Abortion changes you

A recent headline in The New York Times caught my eye: "In Subway Ads on Abortion, a Pretense of Neutrality."

The author of the piece, Susan Dominus, takes issue with an ad campaign for a website called abortionchangesyou.com. One subway poster shows a woman's face with the words, "I thought life would be the way it was before. Abortion changes you." Then at the bottom, the website name: abortionchangesyou.com. Nothing more, nothing less.

"The campaign, which has run in New York subways for the past month, makes a sweeping claim," Dominus wrote, "but as anti-abortion strategies go, it is relatively oblique---a far cry from a brick in the window or a death threat to a member of Congress."

I guess she thinks it's unfair that "a young woman pondering a difficult choice" would find on the website "the personal narrative of a woman troubled by her own abortion." Dominus refers to the ad's "purported neutrality" as helping to undermine recent efforts by both sides on the abortion debate to find common ground. By contrast, she lauds the work of a post-abortion hotline in San Francisco called Exhale. Its website says that for women who've had abortions, feelings of "happiness, sadness, empowerment, anxiety, relief or guilt are common."

I don't think most people seeing the ad in question would presume that it's neutral. The website's very name makes its position crystal clear---that women are changed by abortion. Dominus and other subway riders are free to agree or disagree. No doubt she'd find an ad campaign that read "Abortion is murder" offensive on the face of it. But to claim that this one is offensive because it is, in her view, a stealth campaign is absurd. Me thinks she doth protest too much.