The Anti-Choice Movement's Bag of Dirty Tricks

By Jeanine Plant, AlterNet
Posted on November 1, 2007, Printed on November 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66453/

Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion, the recent documentary by Stephen Fell and Will Thompson, is an eye-opening, must-see portrait of the pro-life movement's win-at-all-costs philosophy. It goes beyond the movement's robotic way of staying on-message and reveals anti-choicers' unrepentant, and often subtle, employment of dirty tricks. What makes these tricks so disturbing -- and, arguably, effective -- is that most of them aren't coming from extremists perpetuating bald-faced lies. Instead, it's the reasonable-seeming, public-relations-type woman who pushes misinformation about a link between abortion and breast cancer. It's the young student with a Northface backpack who displays horrifying visuals of aborted fetuses on university campuses. It's the nonthreatening, formerly pro-choice 19-year-old who shares her own heartbreaking abortion story.