Two television stations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are getting called on the carpet by local pro-life groups after they decided not to air a pro-life commercial exposing the sales of aborted baby body parts. Wisconsin pro-life groups are pushing legislation to prohibit the practice, which is prominent at the University of Wisconsin.
After shocking videos released by the Center for Medical Progress showed Planned Parenthood selling aborted babies and the body parts of aborted babies, additional reports showed the University of Wisconsin is caught up in the controversy. The university purchased body parts from babies killed in abortions at Planned Parenthood.
As LifeNews previously reported, the Dean of the University of Wisconsin’s health school defended the school’s decision to buy aborted baby body parts for research and said banning their negotiations would negatively impact the work of medical researchers.
Seeking to stop the practice, Reps. Andre Jacque and Joel Kleefisch have introduced legislation that would ban the sale of fetal body parts in the state and local pro-life groups put a commercial together to support the measure.
However, two Milwaukee television stations have told two pro-life organizations they can’t buy airtime during select news programming because the advertisement they want to air is not approved by station management. Here’s more:
Fox6 and WISN have both declined to air an advertisement sponsored by Wisconsin Family Action and Pro-Life Wisconsin even though the ad is very similar to other political and issue ads run by other organizations. The topic of the ad is AB 305, a measure that seeks to stop aborted fetal body parts from being used in scientific and medical research in Wisconsin.
Originally the two groups wanted to run the 30-second ad (below) during morning and evening news. WISN told one of the organizations they wouldn’t air the ads during the evening news, but they could air them during entertainment programming. Fox6, WITI, was more draconian, tersely informing Wisconsin Family Action that the ad would not be aired after 4am or before 10pm on the station.
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“After review by our station management team we have made the decision to accept (air) the two commercials after 10pm and before 4am. We are not comfortable with the content during morning, daytime and primetime hours,” wrote Mike Neal, director of sales at WITI, in an e-mail dated December 30.
The pro-life organizations had originally sought to buy airtime on WITI for the morning news.
A person who works for Wisconsin Family Action said that although WISN offered daytime and late night options to run the ad, none of the programming reached the type of audience the organization hoped to reach via the evening news.
The University of Wisconsin is one of a handful of institutions that has been caught purchasing the body parts of aborted babies for research in the wake of revelations about Planned Parenthood’s organ harvesting business. In fact, nearly 700 faculty members from the Wisconsin school have signed a letter arguing that a bill to ban the sale of fetal body parts in the state would cut off “hope for patients” and deter biomedical students and the biotechnology industry from coming to their University because it shows “that Wisconsin is no place to do business.”
However, the doctors in the op-ed argue the exact opposite. They write, “The argument that fetal-derived tissues must be used in research to develop medical treatments is false. Many therapies have been developed using cell lines not of fetal origin, including insulin for diabetes (produced in bacteria), Herceptin for breast cancer and tissue plasminogen activator for heart attack, stroke and pulmonary embolism (both developed in Chinese hamster ovary cells).”
They continued, “Other successes include five new FDA-approved drugs (as of 2011) developed using the (chemical) glutamine synthetase system and more than 70 successful treatments developed using adult stem cell sources. Even though the often-cited polio vaccine was developed using fetal tissue cells, the developers of the vaccine later testified that initial studies were also successful using cells that were not of fetal origin. Therefore, it is misleading to suggest that important medical advances would not have been possible without using cells of fetal origin.”
Additionally, the Wisconsin doctors address the claim that students in the biotechnology industry will be steered away from the University of Wisconsin if they halt research on aborted babies. They explained, “To the claim that restricting the use of abortion-derived fetal tissue will cause research to come to a halt and an exodus of research talent from the state, we answer that we have experienced the opposite. Students and researchers have left science altogether after failing to find research laboratories that did not use abortion-derived or human embryonic tissues.”
