Lying Liars Recant (Well, a little)

Well, looky here: It seems that First Place Pregnancy Centre has updated its controversial links page. And check out the date of the update.

Resource Disclaimer:
The list of referral agencies is intended solely for your convenience. None of these agencies are affiliated with First Place, and no express or implied warranty is made concerning the quality of services or goods offered by them. You are therefore cautioned to make your own determination as to the fitness of any such agency and of any services or goods offered by them.
We hope you'll find these links helpful.

Last Updated: 2007-12-03

What controversial links? you ask. The ones Heather Mallick went through with Senators Foundation president, Dave Ready.

We went through the First Place site links together. There's a standard disclaimer but First Place hopes we'll find them "helpful." I told Ready that some of the news headlines appeared to be libellous, particularly the ones linking corporations that make birth control drugs to the Jewish Holocaust and one drug itself to Nazi death camps. Others were grotesque: "One baby in 30 left alive after medical abortion" turns out to be an absurd, unsubstantiated anonymous "news story" in a British entertainment magazine.
You're also guided to a donation page for the American Life League, a hardline group based outside Washington. There's a shop, admittedly very funny, that sells "Abortion is mean" T-shirts for two-year-olds.
They offer booklets explaining that abortion is wrong even in the case of incest. They tell members to scare away raped children outside abortion clinics. They call RU-486 "the anti-human pesticide." They offer sample letters to the editor to send to outlets that employ, I imagine, columnists like me. One begins: "Planned Parenthood is not 'a good guy.'"
Ready gets more and more quiet as we track this. Soon he is desperate to get off the phone. He will not let me talk to a Better Half, who might well explain that she hadn't known that First Place is financed by the Bethel Pentecostal Church in Ottawa and its mission — declared on the Bethel website but nowhere on the First Place site — is not just anti-abortion but anti-birth control.

So, as we reported yesterday, while the Sens are still treating their fans as somnolent cash cows, there has been at least one good thing to come out of this PR fiasco -- a little less lying bullshit on the Interwebz.

UPDATE:
More bloggers weigh in: Feministing and Shameless.

(First published at Birth Pangs.)