Thursday, July 13, 2006

Did You Know Search Engines can be ProLife?!

Alternet published this one!

Those lovely looking men on your left? Why that's Joe and Jack - "the good Catholic boys" - who started "ProLifeSearch.com" powered by Google! That's them handing over a check to the Executive Director of a "women's health center." Well, you know, it's a health center in the sense that they talk to women and they, you know, talk vaguely about health.

50% of the user generated profits of the world's first "prolife search engine" go to lovely pro-life organizations like Priests for Life and One More Soul (which teaches us that "... the use of contraception harms everyone involved...the use of contraception leads to abortion"). There are dozens of approved pro-life charities to which Joe and Jack cannot wait to donate. Some people even decide to directly donate money to these charities via ProLifeSearch.com "in memory of the unborn children of abortion" or "in memory of Terri Schiavo." Yes, Terri Schiavo.

I decided to test out the search engine. Of course, what was the first word I put into the engine? How can you NOT put the word "abortion" into a prolife search engine? That little box was just screaming for the word abortion. So, I typed it in - slowly. I thought maybe fire and brimstone would burst forth from my screen. Maybe an alarm would sound? Maybe my computer would get tagged as some sort of computer-intruder?! No. It's just a regular search engine. Regular pro-choice and pro-life sites came up. I found the abortion clinic I work for easily.

What's funny to me is that they actually make a point of saying that their search engine is "safe" for kids to use because they've filtered out the porn (seemingly it's okay if your kids find accurate information on abortion though): At ProLifeSearch.com we use a special program filter called SafeSearch. With SafeSearch, sites and web pages containing adult themed and explicit sexual content are excluded from web search results.

So, apparently it's okay if the teenage children of these prelifers need to find an abortion clinic for themselves or their girlfriends using ProLifeSearch.com? Because we get a lot of clients at our clinic who self-identify as prolife, who say their parents are prolife and would "kill them" if they found out where they were, but they just really, really need to get this one abortion.

I have to say, why don't we come up with ideas like this? There are 13 states that now allow their citizens to purchase "Choose Life" license plates with the proceeds going towards prolife organizations. There are 0 states with similar license plate deals for prochoice organizations. I really don't think these strange social entrepeneurial experiments should be a priority for reproductive justice advocates. But they are smart and creative ways to ensure that these organizations are getting the broad support they need to remain healthy and to continue to meet their missions.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You work for an abortion clinic? Ok. Let me ask you a question, do you tell the people coming in for an abortion about the statistics of how many of them will most likely not be able to conceive ever again and that the child they are currently carrying may be their only child? 5% of women are "sterilized". If you flew on an airline that crashed 5 times out of a 100, you would be called crazy. What about the depression that almost 50% experience and the fact that more than 90% of women wished that they never had aborted their baby? What about the fact that there is a 3x increase on the potential of Tubal pregnancies? How about the 51% increase of breast cancer among women who had abortions?

And if you also happen to be a feminist and into "women's rights", shouldn't it be the right of the woman to know these stats before putting her "reproductive health" at risk. (I always find it strange that pro-abortionists scream "reproductive health and rights" and try to hide the real facts...)


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