Spanish bill would allow girls 16 and 17 to get an abortion without parental consent

Stained glass of St. Patrick by C.E. Kempe in the church of St John the Baptist. / Lawrence OP via Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Armagh, Northern Ireland, Mar 16, 2022 / 17:08 pm (CNA).
This Saint Patrick’s Day is a time for prayer and action for … […]

Farm laborers tend to squash in a field on the outskirts of the central Californian town of Solvang on June 12, 2005. / Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 1, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).
The U.S. Conference of C… […]

An image from the Canadian pro-life group Choice42’s animated video encouraging pregnant women to choose life. / Choice42

Montreal, Canada, Jul 5, 2021 / 11:00 am (CNA).

A viral video is challenging society and the media for pressuring women to choose abortion. Its message is simple: Women have an incredible Wonder Woman-like ability to choose life for their unborn baby – and succeed. They can, in other words, choose life for two.

Canadian pro-life group Choice42 released its animated video encouraging pregnant women to choose life on May 29. The short film follows a scared, wide-eyed young woman as she flees from the dark monsters of societal pressure and struggles to climb up a mountain. The video attracted hundreds of thousands of views on social media and was so successful that, on June 28, the group released a version in Portuguese, appealing to countries like Brazil. It empowers women with the truth that, yes, “you can do this.”

EWTN Pro-Life Weekly highlighted a clip from the two-minute video on June 26. 

“So you’re pregnant. You didn’t plan this. You didn’t want it. And now you have a choice to make,” the narrator says as the animation begins. “Take a breath. You can do this.”

“No matter what’s going on in your life, you can rise up and take this on,” she adds. “You can rock this.”

But, the narrator cautions, “I’m going to be real with you.”

“The choices that our society and the media are going to present you with, they’re not all equal,” she says. “Right now, your baby’s heart is already beating. That started about 21 days after conception. We’re talking about another human being here, and not just any human being. Your baby.”

The video goes on to warn that “abortion is probably going to be suggested, even pushed on you” also “by the people closest to you.”

But, the narrator urges, “you’re already this baby’s mother.”

“This child is already here in the world, living and growing inside you,” she says. “And what these people are suggesting to you is that you murder your own baby.”

While the narrator acknowledges that her words might sound harsh, she says, “I’m not going to lie to you. Not when your baby’s life is on the line.”

But pregnant women are “not alone, not by a long shot.”

“Reach out for help if you need it,” the narrator says. “We’ll help you.”

As an organization, Choice42 does just that: It exists to expose abortion for what it is and to empower pregnant women to choose life by providing emotional support, educational programs, and financial assistance.

The founder and director, Laura Klassen, dedicates her time to creating videos like this and others, in which she often wears her trademark pink wig. This one, she said, took six months to create.

“We just thought, why don’t we just put this into a video,” she told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly. “Something really relatable to mostly younger women, and just put that out there so that hopefully we can reach more women with our message even if we’re not talking with them one-on-one.”

[…]