The choice that pro-choicers aren't pro - reaction to pro-life television advertisements paid for by the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation that favor adoption

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Maria McFadden

In early 1992, cable-television watchers across America were surprised to see a commercial that was patently pro-life. It was an attractive, professionally done commercial, the kind that might promote Chase Manhattan Bank or U.S. Healthcare, with artfully shot photos of kids, lots of beautiful kids. A school door opens and children in parochial-school uniforms pour out laughing; impish toddlers grin out at us from Halloween costumes. Meanwhile a warm-sounding voice says: "All these children have one thing in common. All of them were unplanned pregnancies . . . that could have ended in abortion. But their parents toughed it out, listened to their hearts and discovered . . . that sometimes the best things in life aren't planned. Life What a beautiful choice."

This is one of a series of pro-life ads still being run by the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation, a Christian evangelical group based in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. As Newsweek reports, the late Arthur DeMoss was a born-again Christian who made a fortune in the insurance business. His widow, Nancy, now heads the foundation, which conrtibutes to such groups as Campus Crusade for Christ, the Pat Boone Foundation, and the conservative Free Congress Foundation.

Another commercial specifically features an adoption: a man receives a telephone call, and then tells his wife that their baby is ready. The next shot is of the couple receiving an infant from a nurse's arms; all three adults have tear-brimming smiles. A third commercial focuses on a young girl who has survived a botched abortion. As we see the attractive girl sing "Amazing Grace" with what looks like her high-school choir, she narrates her tale: she has had medical problems resulting from the abortion attempt, but she is alive, and she realizes what a precious gift life is.

Reaction to the ads from Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and even the advertising industry has been fast and furious. That the ads would be damned for being anti-abortion was to be expected; however, there has been an equal amount of bitterness over their pro-adoption stance, even though only the one ad explicitly promotes adoption. Glamour calls the first ad described above part of DeMoss's "pro-adoption ad campaign," and Newsweek's story, headlined "A Hymn to Adoption - or Is It?" implies that the children in the first ad have been adopted-though they are identified simply as "unplanned." This confusion between anti-abortion and pro-adoption messages leads one to suspect that the two are inextricably linked in the media's mind as dangerous to those who claim to be "pro-choice."

Newsweek goes in to say: "the ads would be less controversial were it not for the provocative adoption - abortion link." Would they? Alexander C. Sanger, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of New York City (and grandson of Margaret Sanger), wrote in January, "The DeMoss Foundation ads should be seen for what they are, a stealth weapon in the Foundation's attack on abortion. . . . The ads are a terrible and ineffective way to promote adoption. . . . The DeMoss Foundation offers a shameless sales pitch: thirty seconds of romanticized views of beautiful children. The rosy, heavenly images in the ads seem more likely to persuade young teens, whose views of parenting may already be more ideal than real, to choose to keep their babies, rather than choosing adoption or abortion." Keeping babies is apparently as unacceptable as placing them for adoption.

Critics of the ads complain that they are expensive and "slick," though those two words would probably describe any effective ad campaign, for anything from cigarettes to stuffing mix to help for the homeless. Peter Donald in the New York Observer sniffs righteously at the estimated $40 million spent by the "wealthy" foundation. But the De-Moss Foundation's estimated assets of $400 million pale beside the Rockefeller Foundation's $2.1 billion or the Ford Foundation's $6.2 billion; both the latter have donated millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood. Though it claims to be privately funded and non-profit, Planned Parenthood receives millions of U.S. tax dollars every year. Planned Parenthood's revenue in 1991 alone was $403 million, of which $124 million came from the government.

Barbara Lippert, an advertising critic for Adweek writing in the August 1992 Glamour, likened the ads to the TV spots during Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign, which focused not on him but on "golden images of weddings, houses being built, and children running." She claims their "Downy-soft visual style" got them past the censors who refused to run "two out of four Planned Parenthood ads because of their |content.' "(She also mentions that NARAL has run spots on CNN, which however came under "incredible scrunity.") The idea that parents should "tough it out" she denounces as being judgmental; "While adoption is wonderful, much is left out of the scene showing parents picking up a perfect white baby. The process all too often neglects the children who are born HIV-positive or crack addicted, or who are sick or handicapped."