Roundup: More, Yes MORE Billboards in Wisconsin

Pro-Life Wisconsin is starting another billboard campaign.  Looks like they've got money to burn this Christmas

Only a few days after announcing a partnership to erect billboards across Milwaukee that claim abortion is a form of African American genocide, Pro-Life Wisconsin is now declaring a kinder, more gentle, festive billboard campaign for the state as well.

Via The Cap Times:

Just days after posting billboards in the city of Milwaukee equating abortions with black genocide Pro-Life Wisconsin, an organization that fights all forms of birth control and abortions, has erected two signs in La Crosse featuring ultrasound images the organization claim represent the baby Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb.

Placed over the fetus in the billboards is a miniature halo. “He’s on His Way. Christmas Starts with Christ,” the sign reads, linking viewers to www.churchads.net, described by a Pro-Life press release as a Christian nonprofit in England that sponsored the campaign there.

“Even without the marvels of modern ultrasound technology, far before Christ was born in a manger, He was recognized as a unique and significant individual,” said Peggy Hamill, state director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, in the press release. “It makes perfect sense to fast forward biblical accounts of the baby in Mary’s womb to what Jesus would look like in modern ultrasound.”

The group sponsoring the billboards in England claim that it isn’t supposed to be an anti-abortion message, per se, but a reminder about the “reason for the season.” But few really believe them.

Via the Baptist Press:

A critic called the ad incredibly naïve. “The image is too specifically associated with pro-lifers to be seen in a benign context. They should go back to angels and cribs,” said Terry Sanderson, director of the National Secular Society, the Guardian reported in June in one of its stories about the ad.

Trustees for ChurchAds.net, the ecumenical charity behind the campaign, said the ad “is not, in any way, designed to either support or campaign against abortion.” The poster “announces the imminent birth of the Christ child in the way that many modern-day parents choose to announce the coming birth of their own child,” they said in a written statement.

A British pro-life leader, however, saw the ad as a “wonderful help in changing people’s minds in the abortion issue.”

“This is not a cluster of cells but a human person and it just happens to be the God man Jesus…. That is a very, very powerful statement that will strike a chord with the general population,” said John Smeaton of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, according to the Guardian.

Jonathan Edwards, general secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, commended the ad: “The picture of a scan is one of the most defining moments of a pregnancy these days — it’s full of promise and anticipation. I’m delighted to see this year’s Christmas advert and pray it will encourage many people to sit up and take note of the Christmas message.”

But is this now simply overwhelming campaigning via billboard going to help win people to the anti-abortion side, or simply annoy more and more Wisconsinites?  

Via Express, Milwaukee:

Jerks of the Week

Pro-Life Wisconsin

Instead of committing to a rational discussion about how to reduce unwanted pregnancies among African-American women, the radical anti-contraception, anti-abortion group Pro-Life Wisconsin (PLW) has chosen instead to sponsor 13 billboards in Milwaukee and a website chock full of misleading information. PLW’s campaign urges black women to consider adoption instead of abortion. That’s fine. But they fail to promote contraception and comprehensive sex education as additional ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies. 

As for me, I’m personally considering buying all of my family and friends Wisconsin billboards as Christmas presents this year.  They are obviously going for very cheap.

Mini-Roundup: The “Women Veterans Bill of Rights” passed yesterday.  One right women veterans aren’t allowed?  The right to chose to end a pregnancy.

December 2, 2010

December 1, 2010