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Pro-Life Rhetoric Masquerading as Unbiased information: Ick

September 10th, 2007     by Stacey May Fowles     Comments

So, when I heard about a new website that gave teen girls “straight facts about sex, choices and where to go for support” I was really excited. Teens need sexual health resourses and online is a great place to have them. But what proknowledge.org fails to mention is that they’re actually an anti-choice group that directs teens to pregnancy-crisis centres. If you’re unaware, a pregnancy-crisis centre is a non-profit organization that works to discourage pregnant women from having an abortion. If you click the “Need Help” link on Proknowledge’s website that’s the only resource you’ll get.

Seems to me the site is less like an unbiased sexual health resource site and more like a thinly veiled pro-life site.

Now I’m not adverse to pro-life organizations having a presence on the internet, I’m simply adverse to them masquerading as a place for teens to get information “free from lectures, social scrutiny and judgments.” (Yes, that’s an actual quote.) There are all sorts of “no-sex before marriage” messages and “pre-marital sex will kill you” scare tactics on the site, even going as far to make false and misleading statements like “the divorce rate for people who live together before marriage is almost 50% higher than for those who do not” and “did you know that domestic abuse happens considerably more often to unmarried women if they are living with a guy?”

It gets worse: the site goes on to spread misinformation about contraception and abortion (you know, the lying kind that says abortions cause breast cancer? They don’t.) In fact, the entire site is written in such a way that states “you might think it’s a good idea to have sex/use condoms/live together/make your own decisions, but…” and that just peeves me right off. The whole message is “no sex (or even cohabitation) before marriage or suffer dire consequences,” and that seems a little lopsided to me.

Feministing.com had this to say:

Why is it that anti-choicers think so little of young women? Do they really think that young women can’t handle the truth about sex? Pathetic.

You want some unbiased sexual information, “Sex Ed for the Real World,” go here.

Tags: body politics

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