Student Debates Role of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

To the Editors:

Before anything relevant to the abortion issue can be said, the true point of disagreement must be identified: the humanity of the fetus. If one
believes fetuses to be members of the human race, strenuous efforts to prevent the killing of fetuses are very much in order. Conversely, if one believes fetuses to be less than human, then efforts to prevent other people from being inconvenienced as a result of irrational taboos against the killing of fetuses might be helpful. A woman should always have the right to choices about her own body, but if the fetus is human, then she or he likewise has the right not to have choices forced upon her or him: in this case, death. If anyone has objections to this logic I will be fascinated to hear them, because I cannot imagine any. These are the two alternatives we face regarding abortion, but the objective of this particular letter is not to choose between them.
I would rather leave that question up in the air (though I have a feeling the response to this letter may force me to discuss it soon) and simply examine Marianna Leavy-Sperounis’ claims about the “false advertisements” of adoption services, in terms of ethics and political theory. These Crisis Pregnancy Centers openly advertise an alternative to abortion: adoption.
They are presumably run by people who believe the first of the two alternatives above: that the fetus is human, and that abortion is wrong. They advertise their service in such a way as to put it in direct competition with the abortion industry. For this reason, they show anti-abortion videos in order to promote the alternative they provide and to discourage abortion. In the same way, when one goes to buy a can of Pepsi, one sees advertisements for Pepsi all over the Pepsi dispenser. As far as I can discern from her letter, Leavy-Sperounis faults the CPCs not for false advertising but simply for advertising, and she demands legislation preventing such exercise of free speech based on the mandates of one’s conscience. It is as if someone would write a letter demanding laws to prevent the insidious distribution of pro-Pepsi propaganda because this anti-Coke movement ruthlessly sought to deny soft-drink buyers the full range of thirst-quenching services. Leavy-Sperounis claims not to advocate censorship, but based on the rest of the letter I don’t believe her.

Of course, practically speaking, censorship on behalf of the abortion industry is nothing new. Glamour magazine recently published an article on abortion saying that there are no long-term health risks associated with it, even though almost all studies reveal an unmistakable link between abortion and breast cancer. Also, since the Clinton years, America has been performing taxpayer-funded abortions abroad, triumphantly carrying abortion rights to women in third world countries so that a few years hence we will have far fewer “little brown brothers” to bother about helping (or wresting land and resources from). (Of course, this was the purpose for which Planned Parenthood was originally founded: to distribute birth control among “undesirables” in the rural South in order to reduce the burden on the State which they supposedly were. Look it up.) And since most American women don’t know that natural childbirth is four times as survivable as an abortion (which is not surprising since the procedure most commonly used is analogous to that used to chemically disinfect a swimming pool — except with stronger chemicals), I doubt if they tell women in Namibia about it either. We need not look so far away to find violations of women’s rights in the name of abortion. Stories of women who were harassed into having abortions either by social workers colluding with local abortionists, or by employers who don’t want to pay for a maternity leave (many of them then dying or suffering permanent injury in botched abortions), are reported every day, but they seldom make it into the mainstream media because of the political influence of abortionists and their supporters (www.prolifeinfo.org/oldnews.html). The reason for this bias is simple: abortion is much more profitable to those who provide it than adoption. Same reason why Nikes are made in Indonesia.
Free speech means that even if a person disagrees with the law, one always has the right to speak, write, or advertise according to the mandates of conscience. During the Nazi regime, those who believed that Jews deserved human rights were not allowed to express this belief publicly or form organizations to advance their agenda. The first-amendment rights of Abolitionists were likewise threatened and violated in the years prior to the Civil War. I am afraid the day is already here when similar laws are in force in California and may soon be in the entire country.

–Patrick Schwemmer
College sophomore