On the drive home from LA

The drive home from Louisiana was great (the trip was great, too) but after a while the anti-choice billboards really made me grind my teeth. They started on I 55 in Mississippi and were especially prevalent in Arkansas and Missouri, continuing with great frequency along I 70. They were crude and emotional (a thumb-sucking fetus with the slogan, “Don’t kill me, Mommy!”) and often included Bible quotes yanked out of context (an ultrasound photo with the line, “Woman, behold thy son”) and I started to wonder why the pro-choice movement doesn’t counter with some billboards of our own.

The first one I’d like to put up would have 2 words: TRUST WOMEN, with the web address of Planned Parenthood or NARAL under that. I’d also like to see a “Prayerfully Pro Choice” billboard with a photo of a family praying, and the RCRC web address underneath. And a “Pro-Faith, Pro-Choice” featuring a family in church (and the RCRC address) would be a good one, too.

But here’s my over-the-top billboard idea. Picture a side view of a woman lying prone and draped on an exam table, feet in stirrups. A stern-faced male doctor with some outlandish googly goggles peers between her knees, while a government bureaucrat stands looking over his shoulder, noting something on a clip board. The caption would read: KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY WOMB! (Maybe the bureaucrat would have the face of Bart Stupak or some other bigot.)

I know it’s crude and emotional and potentially offensive to many, but see the above descriptions of the anti-choice billboards. At about $2500 a month it’s not an insignificant investment to put one of these billboards up. But the far right has succeeded in getting the U.S. congress and president to ban federal funding for a legal medical procedure with proven benefits to women’s health from the health care bill –– I think it’s time to admit that their crude, emotional and potentially offensive ads have worked.

In hijacking the national conversation about reproductive freedom, the far right has been able to claim that theirs is the ONLY faith-full perspective, and the only family/woman/child honoring viewpoint. Now they claim that choice equals genocide against African Americans. (See Melissa Harris-Lacewell’s latest in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100405/harris-lacewell)

I know, leftist liberal folks like me are supposed to be above the low down dirty tactics of the right wing. Yeah, that’s why the “elitist” charge sticks so well, and may be part of the reason Americans’ reproductive freedom is facing erosion like never before. I say: Let’s get dirty.