Pro-Life Groups Blast NARAL's New Ad Campaign

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Pro-life groups are reacting with shock and disdain to the National Abortion Rights Action League's (NARAL) new "Choice for America" advertising campaign, calling it a "desperate act by a desperate movement." Such groups say NARAL is trying to deal with a decline in the depth and breadth of its support.

The new ad campaign features a 30-second television commercial and several supplementary 15-second commercials designed to convince Americans that abortion rights are in imminent danger. NARAL says it plans to buy millions of dollars of airtime over multiple years in a number of U.S. states considered important to its survival.

The lead commercial opens with a professionally dressed, attractive woman reading a newspaper with the headline "ABORTION OUTLAWED." The woman gasps, at which point the ad shifts to another scene outside a courthouse in which a frowning, male Supreme Court justice stares at a group of flashing cameras held by newspaper reporters.

The ad then appears to run in reverse, as the woman walks backward down the city street. A NARAL leaflet she had dropped comes up to meet her hand as the ad continues to flow in reverse. Near the end of the piece, the woman walks backward past a group of NARAL activists handing out leaflets.

The commercial ends with the reminder, "There's still time to protect your right to choose."

Given the emphasis on turning back time and acting in retrospect, some feel the commercial betrays NARAL's fear that its current supporters are not adequately interested in the movement right now.

"We're talking about what the majority of women in this country want, and it's not the unrestricted abortion that we have today," Focus on the Family spokesperson Carrie Gordon Earll told Talon News.

"That really puts people like [NARAL President] Kate Michaelman and NARAL in a difficult position, because they claim to represent a constituency, but it seems like women are going in a different direction," Earll said.

"I think these scare tactics are to try to stir up whatever base they have left in the pro-abortion movement and that is a base that is quickly dwindling in this country," Earll added.

In fact, it does not appear that the campaign is as broad, extensive, or potent as NARAL expresses in its press releases. The entire cost of the campaign is purportedly around $3 million, far less than the cost of a true national campaign, much less a multi-year one.

"[NARAL doesn't] have to spend that much, but by making it a very in-your-face kind of commercial, their intention is to get a lot of newspapers and TV news doing stories on it," Concerned Women for America Senior Policy Director Wendy Wright told Talon News. "I just want to dispel this myth that this is some kind of big media buy, because the newspaper reports I've seen make it sound [that way]."

"There is speculation that there may be a court vacancy, but before there is even an empty chair, these groups are in high gear, running scare tactic ads, spending millions of dollars to campaign against any court nominee that might disagree with unrestricted abortion," Earll remarked to Talon News.

The commercials play off of a number of male-female contrasts designed to raise the ire of viewers. The lead actress puts her hands over her mouth on seeing the newspaper, gives a sharp gasp and stumbles away from the newspaper rack. The commercial immediately switches to an image of the male Supreme Court justice, who is standing erect and confident and staring disdainfully at an all-male press entourage.

When the commercial switches back to a take of the actress walking in reverse, there is a split-second gray frame coinciding with what appears to be a distorted scream. This subliminal effect is soon contrasted with another distorted sound, this time of a sigh of relief, when the woman first grasps the NARAL flier.

Throughout the commercial, men walking in the background lend a subtle, dark effect. A large percentage of the men walking down the street have 1930s-style gray hats on, with averted faces. They walk aggressively, and given the commercial's reversed orientation, constantly appear poised to bump into the woman. Excluding the three NARAL activists, practically all of the black-clad pedestrians are male.

The woman herself is dressed like a high-powered professional, which caught the eye of some pro-life activists.

"NARAL attracts wealthy elite people," Wright told Talon News. "Their membership is not made up of minorities or underprivileged people, which is ironic when you consider how many times we are told that we need to have abortion so that poor people won't have lots of children. [B]ut the people who are politically active on abortion are those who don't want to be bothered with poor people."

"Margaret Sanger who started Planned Parenthood ... based her arguments on eugenics, that we need to do away with the flotsam and jetsam of society, the poor and minorities," Wright continued. "[H]er message was attractive to the wealthy in society, who also wanted abortion for their own needs [because] they didn't want to be burdened with children. NARAL seems to be following along the same track."

Some feel that NARAL's current advertising campaign betrays its inability to convince women of the virtues of abortion through the traditional pro-abortion marketing strategy. NARAL's current effort focuses on "choice" without mentioning abortion, and is a result of the same strategy that led NARAL to append "Pro-Choice America" to its name. The new name de-emphasizes the word "abortion," which pro-life activists claim is now viewed negatively by a majority of the population.

"We don't waste our donors' money on nonexistent campaigns," Earll told Talon News. "This is overreaction and panic by the pro-abortion groups, and I say let them spend their money. Pro-life groups are getting their message out steadily and faithfully with truth every year, and that is why the polls continue to show that Americans are not comfortable with abortion."

"[W]hat it goes back to is they just have a few targeted markets that they are running the ads in, and the message that's winning over people's hearts of minds is that abortion kills an unborn child and abortion harms women," Wright concurred. "NARAL's ads don't address either of those."

The commercials in question can be viewed from the following URL: http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/about/ads/index.cfm

From The Circle Of Life Hang Many Rings

Forty years ago, I was a senior in High School. My graduated class is planning fortieth reunion festivities. Those facts, combined with a sprinkle of new facts that will be relevant in a moment, cause me to offer the following thought: the circle of life that is a lifetime (if you make it into the air world from the water world, and that thought will become relevant shortly, also) is hallmarked by rings of seemingly a causal events that are synchronistic in nature … somehow, events throughout a lifetime are connected to seemingly distant events one has witnessed during a lifetime but would not initially see as connected by cause and effect.

During my senior year in High School, I was sweet on a really cute girl. We will call ‘Sweet Sue’ for privacy sake. In the spring of that year, Sue’s parents invited me into their house one evening, to ask if I would like to marry their daughter! Well, at eighteen, with independence and college in my sights, I had no intentions of marrying this lovely creature so soon. When I shared this sentiment with her parents, I was informed that she was pregnant. It was impossible for this child in the womb to have been my child. Besides being crushed to learn of implied conundrums such as fidelity and true love deferred, I reasoned out the parents’ offer as a means to ‘save Sweet Sue’s honor. It surely was all of that, but there was something far deeper, something I didn’t come to connect until recent events in my own household. And here’s where the rings dangling from the circle of life come in …

I have a twenty-years-old stepdaughter whom recently we learned is pregnant … and she’s no more married or committed than was Sweet Sue. Now THAT’S a stunner, but here’s how the synchronicity arises. Sue became pregnant a full decade before Roe v Wade. Three decades have passed since the Roe fiat ruling legalized society’s tacit acceptance and expedient reliance upon killing newly conceived human beings. In thinking through my own emotions and confusion regarding my stepdaughter’s sudden pregnancy, I came to realize a deeper reason for Sweet Sue’s parents offering their daughter for marriage to a boy not the father of their coming grandchild. [With that hint, many will already know the synchronistic connection, but I’ll muddle on, anyway.]

Because I abhor abortion and my wife has come to think likewise, we immediately conceived of that prenatal human as our grandchild … and so did Sweet Sue’s parents, and they didn’t want to lose that baby from their family just as today we do not want to lose the current little one in our midst. An eighteen-years-young boy can be forgiven for not grasping that concept so many years before our current horrific reality of abortion on demand and at the sole discretion of the pregnant female. Things are far worse, today.

Sweet Sue offered her baby for adoption (and with Sue’s beauty and normally good sense, it is likely that some couple has enjoyed decades of blessing from Sue’s ‘choice’). Sadly, my stepdaughter is strongly considering the same avenue. The parallels between Sue and my stepdaughter, though decades removed, are amazing … and of course the parallel between Sue’s parents and their conflicted hearts and our current sagging hearts is also notable, so allow me to offer a moral to this story.

Forty years ago, the stigma of bearing a child out of wedlock was foremost in my young mind; what concerned Sue’s parents more was the prospect of their grandchild not being in their lives. After thirty years of abortion on demand, there appears to still be a stigma to out-of-wedlock pregnancy, yet to go and hire a serial killer to ‘handle the problem’ has little or no stigma attached! America, something is really, really screwy in that reality. How did we reach the societal stage when killing a prenatal being is more acceptable than bringing that baby into our midst to share life, either in our home as a member of our family or as an adoptee?

It will tear at my old heart to see this baby adopted, but I refuse to attach any stigma to my stepdaughter given that she made the second ‘choice’ correctly, even if she’s fumbling the third or fourth choice. This baby will be a survivor in the abortion holocaust era … and for that I give thanks to Almighty God. Within certain sub-cultures of society, the stigma of out-of-wedlock child bearing is all but forgotten, yet these same peoples have the higher rates of abortion to their posterity. Something is terribly wrong with that, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Tom Daschle, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, bill Clinton, hillary Clinton, liberal left-leaning media! Something is bloody wrong with THAT!

She's a child, not a choice.

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