Andrew Constance MP, the NSW Minister for Transport, has called a bus ad with hands over a pregnant belly in the shape of a love heart “appalling”, and ordered its immediate removal. The ad was so troubling to him he is now “looking into how this was allowed to happen” was accompanied by the words, “A heart beats at four weeks.”
The Facebook user Mr Constance responded to, Josh Hewitt, claimed that this picture and text was “dangerous anti-abortion propaganda”. In further comments to the media, Hewitt claimed “as a man” he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to see that ad, but then contradicted himself by proceeding to mansplain that the ad was “a guilt-driven directive on what to do with their body.”
Andrew Constance MP has not responded to an open letter from the CEO of the organisation behind the ad, Emily’s Voice. Paul O’Rourke made several salient points in his letter, including the fact that NSW Government buses ran very similar ads advising women not to drink when pregnant. I wonder if feminist poseur Josh Hewitt objects to that “guilt-driven directive on what to do with their body”?
A reasonable person will struggle to the difference between concern for mother & child demonstrated by publishing the scientific facts of potential harm to a preborn child from alcohol, and the same concern displayed by ads seeking “to give hope and encouragement to women experiencing an unexpected pregnancy with reliable, timely information and personal stories about other women and families facing an unplanned pregnancy”.
NSW voters deserve an explanation from Mr Constance on how he believes the bus ad in question was in anyway “appalling”, disrespectful, insensitive or untrue in a way that government public service ads are not. The silence is deafening, and looks very much like government overreach and censorship of unapproved opinions in debates about the humanity of preborn living humans and a woman’s right to destroy someone else’s body.
Person, or property? It appears Andrew Constance MP has decided what NSW voters may know & think on that controversial question.
