44 years ago when SPUC was founded to fight against abortion legislation, we could never have imagined what the scope of our campaign would be at the beginning of the 21st century. In late 1966 the first pro-life campaigners had little idea that condom use would demand the attention of SPUC.
Yet here we are in 2010 running a petition against advertising condoms on prime time television. People may wonder why we are doing this. They may protest that contraception is not part of SPUC’s remit. But the question is not so much “Why is SPUC campaigning against television advertisements for condoms which target children?”, as “How can SPUC ignore this?”
SPUC cannot ignore this. Promoting contraception to children is priming them for teenage sex. Teenage sex leads to unintended conceptions and abortions. Southern Cross Bioethics Institute explains how this is so in the briefing prepared for the Society in connection with our petition.
We are running this petition to alert people to the dangers of advertising condoms to children and young teenagers. We can’t shy away from this because condoms are an indelicate subject or because we think that these advertisements won’t affect our children. The risks are real to all children, including the unborn.
These advertisements pose a long-term threat to the culture of life. As increasingly explicit sexual messages are being thrust at our children, their hearts and minds are closing to the pro-life message. As sex is robbed of its special and intimate role in creating new human life, the sense of anything special about an unborn baby is lost too. From the generation of children whose minds have been poisoned about the true meaning of sex and the dignity of new life, who will be left to take up the pro-life cause?
In our struggle to build up a culture of life, one of the most upsetting things we are witnessing is the way in which those who are pursuing an ever more liberal abortion culture, are using children to achieve their ends. Their methods are to subject primary school children to explicit sex education in the classroom where their natural reticence about sexual matters will be broken down, to fill secondary schools with promotional messages about contraception and abortion and to screen condom advertisements in their homes. Our children are in the front line of this anti-life onslaught. We cannot leave them exposed and unprotected.
