Edmonton Prolife

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I tried to take pictures of the PORN NATION images all over campus, but with no luck. My digital camera appears to be busted. However, let us continue our tour of on-campus advertising with the lovely image on your left, from Edmonton Prolife. A friend of mine reminded me of this ad, which, as well as another one, with the same image but different text (”The human heart begins to beat at 22 days. Canada’s government allows women the right to stop it for the next 258 days. Abortion. Have we gone too far?”) appears in the LRT terminal at the University Station.

When I showed this advertisement to a friend of mine, she misunderstood me. This advertisement pisses me off. However, she thought I was upset by the fact that abortions are allowed up to 9 months. This is not the case. First of all, I know that it is not a fact that abortions are allowed for the full 9 months of the pregnancy, and that the people who posted this ad are gross, disgusting, lying scumbags who should be taken out back and shot. Doctors generally do not perform abortions when the fetus is of an age that it could survive outside the womb. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule, in the case when the health of mother, fetus or both is at risk. If there weren’t such exceptions, I would be having some major issues right now.

What upsets me about this advertisement is the fact that they’re lying. The same way the pro-lifers lie about “partial birth abortions”, the medical term for which is dilation and extraction, and which, according to the Guttmacher Institute, constitute 0.17% of the 1.3 million abortions performed in the United States in 2000. (In an aside, another lovely advertisement from the fine folks at Edmonton Prolife reads, “Because Canada has no laws restricting abortion, the governmnet [sic] says you can choose abortion. After the heart starts beating. After the arms and legs appear. After all organs are present. After it sucks its thumb. After it responds to sound. After it could survive outside the womb. After it is partially born. Abortion. Have we gone too far?” Idiots.) That’s approximately 2,000 abortions out of over a million. Not exactly a common procedure. According to the Abortion is Pro Life website, in 1996, fewer than 1% of abortions in the United States occured after the 21st week of pregnancy. Admittedly, that was 11 years ago now, but it’s the only statistic I could find for you. It is worth noting that the number of total abortions actually decreased by 3% between 1996 and 2000.

Edmonton Prolife is unhappy because abortions are performed, period. I am guessing here, but they probably belief than a fetus becomes a human being at the moment of conception, even though at that point it is just a couple cells, not even remotely resembling a human being. In order to support their god-driven claims, they post advertising saying that abortion is legal at any point during the pregnancy. In truth, late term abortions happen very rarely, and it’s never just because the mother decided, “Oh, I changed my mind, I think I’ll get an abortion even though my baby is due in three weeks.” Abortion is Pro Life suggests a few reasons that women get abortions later in the pregnancy, for instance:

1. Pregnancy is undiagnosed until late in the pregnancy.
2. Medical complications, such as the pregnancy will worsen a woman’s health, or she is undergoing chemotherapy.
3. The fetus is somehow abnormal or malformed, and this was not apparent until late in the pregnancy.
4. Teenage pregnancy; in many states in the US, teenage girls have to wait to have an abortion due to delays imposed by the state.
5. It is necessary to raise money before the woman can have the abortion.
6. There are no nearby doctors who perform abortions.
7. In some states, there are state-imposed waiting periods which delay the abortion.

They also cite shame due to rape as a reason, but I’ve excluded it from my list because it’s something of a red herring. I don’t think a significant portion of aborted pregnancies come from rape. Some do, of course, but tens of thousands.

Now that we’ve gone over why I don’t like this advertising, it goes without saying that I don’t like having it on campus. Of course, the reason Edmonton Prolife chose to post their disgusting ads in the University LRT station is fairly obvious. There’s a lot of students there, between the ages of 17 and 30, a population whose rate of accidental pregnancy is probably higher than say, women between the ages 10 and 16, or 31 and 50. People in their late teens and early twenties may also be unaware of the truth of the issue, than late-term abortions are not a real, significant issue, but instead a red herring used to villify abortion. Also, the LRT station is visited by a lot of non-students who use the LRT to get between home and work.

Still, seeing such advertisements on campus make my stomach churn, partially because so many people don’t realise how such organisations mis-represent the facts. Take my friend who thought I was upset that abortion was legal in the 8th month of pregnancy — if she had known that the procedure was never performed without a very good reason, she wouldn’t have thought that was why I found it so disgusting, since she knows (or I thought she knew) that I’m vehemently pro-choice.

Eventually I will actually write a post about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I’m currently reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris, although I have a whole bunch of fun textbook reading to do for my courses, which I should stop writing and get to. ;)

Links related to this post: Abortion is Pro Life, Guttmacher Institute, Edmonton Prolife, Edmonton Prolife Ad Campaign, Alberta Prolife, Partial Birth Abortion on Wikipedia.

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