Remember how we ended yesterday’s post about an incredibly tasteless tweet from Planned Parenthood Keystone [Pa.]– “We Need a Disney Princess Who’s Had an Abortion”? Although they had pulled it down after an hour of two, I concluded, “I’m sure after a couple of days of quiet, the same clever folks at PP Keystone that gave us “We Need a Disney Princess Who’s Had an Abortion” will bring back for its audience more tastelessness. Why am I so sure? It’s what they do.”
Well…there were lots of stories about PP Keystone’s “second thoughts,” as the Washington Post’s Avi Selk put it today. But was my prediction accurate? Judge for yourself.
By way of context, the Post, of course, couldn’t be bothered with merely sticking with PP Keystone’s ridiculous foray into “pop culture.” They had to have an immediate link trashing “Disney Princess movies” and a little further in another link to “Why Disney princesses and ‘princess culture’ are bad for girls.”
That PP Keystone might be bad for all girls, born and unborn, is too trivial for Selk to even address.
Selk tells us the President of PP Keystone did not apologize but “has called the message inappropriate and tried to explain the thinking behind it.” So what did she say?
“We joined an ongoing Twitter conversation about the kinds of princesses people want to see in an attempt to make a point about the importance of telling stories that challenge stigma and championing stories that too often don’t get told,” branch president Melissa Reed said in a statement. “Upon reflection, we decided that the seriousness of the point we were trying to make was not appropriate for the subject matter or context, and we removed the tweet.”
Get it? Removing abortion “stigma” and telling stories that don’t often get told is so serious that “upon reflection,” maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to mix this with this “subject matter” in this “context.”
It’s sort of very watered-down version of the already meaningless, “I apologize if it offended you.”
But Selk goes on to tell us that “In the same statement in which she called the original tweet inappropriate, Reed defended her branch’s effort to mix politics and meme culture.”
“Planned Parenthood believes that pop culture — television shows, music, movies — has a critical role to play in educating the public and sparking meaningful conversations around sexual and reproductive health issues and policies, including abortion,” the branch president said. “We also know that emotionally authentic portrayals of these experiences are still extremely rare — and that’s part of a much bigger lack of honest depictions of certain people’s lives and communities.”
So, whatever one-quarter take back the reader might take away from the first part of Reed’s statement is not only repudiated in the second part but signals that we can expect more of this in the future.
This is borne out by something I didn’t know about when I predicted more of the same from PP Keystone. Seik writes
Planned Parenthood Keystone’s social media account once took a popular photo of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recoiling from a shofar, for example, and wrote “centering ALL our patients’ lived experiences and uplifting their stories, regardless of gender identity, immigration status, class or past” over the shofar blower. Emanuel stood for “stigmatizing abortion and shaming patients to appeal to a nonexistent middle ground.”
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To which Selk adds
It wasn’t the most self-explanatory visual pun.
In fact the photo had nothing to do with anything. Emanuel was merely attempting to avoid being clobbered with a good size shofar, a ram’s horn that is blown like a trumpet during certain very holy Jewish religious holidays, most frequently Rosh Hashanah, that was being waved in his face.
Selk tells us, “Planned Parenthood’s national office did not respond to a request for comment.”
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
