ThinkProgress posted yesterday about a sneaky new little tactic from the anti-choice organizations out there hoping to trick women: buying up Google ad space to make their ads for Online for Life among the first hits when someone searches the term “abortion.”
Clever! If you can trick women into clicking on websites about staying pregnant when they try to Google “abortion,” they’ll change their minds when they see that fetus circled with a heart on your homepage! Women are fairly easy to trick.
To help a lady out, I have written a helpful list of ways a woman can identify if she has mistakenly arrived at one of these anti-choice sites while looking for actual medical information instead.
1. This is an easy one. If the site talks about abortion like a Michael Bay movie apocalypse terror scenario, this site, like a Michael Bay movie, has no basis in reality.
2. Rule out pregnancy centers that don’t understand how babies are made in the first place. This is like asking Finn from Glee about how babies are made.
3. Oh look, here’s an organization that tries to raise funds to buy ultrasound machines for crisis pregnancy centers. Pro-lifers imagine this moment of a woman looking at the ultrasound like the kiss at the end of the movie and everyone goes home happy afterwards forever.
Who doesn’t love fantasy? Probably women seeking abortions, who generally don’t change their minds after seeing the sonogram. Avoid sites (and politicians) that believe sonograms have magic powers.
Also, here’s a side tip: maybe don’t let centers with no “medical expert on staff” operate medical machinery on you.
4. You may have to look hard sometimes between otherwise coherent words on a site like this that even has a section on abortion options, but phrases like “the tiny baby will die” generally indicate bias.
5. Avoid sites that talk about abortion like it’s a shopping trip. Would you like to try on this jewelry? Don’t buy so fast! Make the sales representative let you try it on one more time!
This is exactly like the last time you went to Sam’s Club.
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