An advertising company recently removed pro-life billboards from an East London neighborhood after being pressured by a British lawmaker and abortion activists.
Clear Channel apologized to pro-abortion Labour MP Stella Creasy and agreed to her demands to donate its profits from the billboards to a pro-abortion group, the Catholic News Agency reports.
“We sincerely apologize for any offense that has been caused by a recent campaign which we ran in Walthamstow on behalf of a customer,” a Clear Channel spokesperson told PR Week. “As an out-of-home media owner, we take a neutral stance towards all advertising and have robust procedures in place to ensure that the creatives we run comply with the UK advertising codes. While this campaign met these requirements, we accept that the content should have been scrutinised in greater detail and should not have been displayed.”
The Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK paid to run billboards in Creasy’s district to draw attention to her radical pro-abortion agenda. Creasy, who represents Walthamstow, is behind the push to force Northern Ireland to legalize abortion.
The billboards showed the image of a nine-week-old unborn baby and the website StopStella.com. The baby had tiny hands and feet, eyes, nose and ears. Abortion activists slammed it as misleading, claiming the baby must be older than nine weeks; but the world-renowned Mayo Clinic states that by nine weeks, a baby’s “arms grow and elbows appear. Toes are visible and eyelids form.”
In late September, Creasy slammed the billboards as a form of “harassment” and demanded that Clear Channel remove them. Her tweets about the billboards prompted massive outrage from abortion activists, and one billboard was vandalized before it was removed.
According to CNA:
Clear Channel, the company that produced the billboard, issued an apology and pledged to donate the money they were paid for the advertisement to Abortion Support Network. The apology followed a series of tweets by Creasy about a seperate billboard from the same campaign which appeared overnight September 30.
In addition to calling out the company, the MP asked to Metropololitan police to invesitgate the ads as “harassment.”
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Centre for Bioethical Reform UK, which is the UK branch of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, said that the aim of the billboard was to inform the people of Walthamstow about “the humanity of the unborn child and the reality of abortion.”
Creasy did not just criticize the ad company. She also slammed the local police for thinking the billboards are “just ‘free speech’ and not the harassment of women,” and accused them of letting people criticize her point of view because she is a politician.
On Twitter, she even praised people who vandalized one of the billboards.
“I would rather @CCUK_Direct took this advert down, the @metpoliceuk acted to stop the harassment and @patel4witham brought in buffer zone legislation to deal with these people in first place – but in the mean time seems Walthamstow has my back … #lovewalthamstow #hatebullies,” she wrote accompanied by a photo of the vandalism.
Abortion activists are trying to censor British pro-lifers by enacting buffer zones around abortion facilities as well.
