Thank you Planned Parenthood.
“The latest NYC ad campaign creates stigma, hostility and negative public opinions about teen pregnancy and parenthood rather than offering alternative aspirations for young people,” Haydee Morales, vice president of education and training at Planned Parenthood's New York office, said in a statement released on Wednesday. “The city’s money would be better spent helping teens access health care, birth control and high-quality sexual and reproductive health education, not an ad campaign intended to create shock value.”
Planned Parenthood trashes NYC’s ‘Cost of Teen Pregnancy’ PSAs
One of the PSA's in question.
Living in NYC you see a lot of PSAs on the subways and streets. Some contain good information "Kids can get free summer luches." But, many are quite pointless. One of the worse misconceptions that many progressive suffer from is this romantic notion that people make 'bad' choices primarily because they lack very basic education. This can come along witha good dose of "I know better than you" paternalism with respect (most often) to poor people and minorities. The things is, it's often more complex than that. Too often the "choice" isn't even really there.
Much of what I write here is my own attempt to educate (fellow?) progressives about the potential obnoxiousness of their own attempts to educate others. (Since my efforts often feel futile, I suppose there is a lesson in this for everyone. )
In any case, I'm glad that Planned Parenthood had something to say about this obnoxious PSA! And I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people "Don't see what's wrong so with the ad! OMG!" --
Now this action by Planned Parenthood comes in an atmosphere where some people (mostly right-wing idiots) have been calling the organization racist. (more on this.) I think that developing sensitivity to the issues that relate to both race, class and reproductive freedom is the right way to silence the idiots. (Much better than trying to pretend that the founder of the organization never dabbled in Eugenics. Which is kind of hard, because, she kind of did.)
So bravo Planned Parenthood!
Now, they never explicitly mentioned race, but considering the fact that most of these "unwanted" kids are not white, well, it's there. And, the hubbub if they did would be even more annoying. So, I'll do it.
People tend to assume that to criticize this ad is to advocate teen pregnancy, and that's really too simplistic. This ad will not be effective, and it doesn't just stigmatize teen pregnancy it stigmatizes black and latino babies (though the one with the cute curly blonde hair looks a lot like my half-white cousins at the age... meh.. race ain't a science. The point here is three of the four are noticeably "not white" -- and normally I beg for more brown faces in media... but, the only place I seem to get them are in PSAs... looking at the whole landscape it says something about our culture dosen't it?) As for teens, they already know babies are expensive, they either find contraceptives too hard to obtain, or they don't feel they have anything important enough to do to get them to avoid having a baby-- if young women have futures then they are much more likely to plan their pregnancies to fit in to those futures. This is the deeper issue and it's not solved by posters on the trains.
It's insulting to suggest that anyone really thinks a baby is "no big deal" -- Haydee Morales is right: “The city’s money would be better spent helping teens access health care, birth control and high-quality sexual and reproductive health education, not an ad campaign intended to create shock value.” (notice she mentions "high-quality" education. And these ads aren't it.
UPDATE: Here is a chart I think everyone should see before talking about "teen pregnancy" in the US. This ad comes out of a panic minset that almost made sense in the early 1990s, but things have changed.
