The baby-killers' pastel facelift

By Joe Schaeffer

Something rather important has happened with Planned Parenthood over the past couple of months. The abortion behemoth hired a professional design firm to give its killing centers a more "human-centered" facelift. The life-affirming décor attracted a certain amount of media attention due to its sheer creepiness, but let's face it, when your business is murdering babies, you're always gonna be creepy.

So, nothing new there.

No, the more important aspect of this reboot is the tacit acknowledgment by Planned Parenthood that its business model is facing steep decline.

Just as the obesity and type-2 diabetes crises have spurred McDonald's to spin itself as a healthy food choice with its McCafe theme and pressured a frantic soda industry into similar incongruous efforts, so too is Abortion Inc. seeking to re-position itself in an attempt to preserve its market share.

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Still reeling from the negative publicity from last year's undercover video exposés of its selling of baby body parts, Planned Parenthood earlier this year hired global design firm IDEO to help give its clinics a softer touch.

IDEO touts its "human-centered design approach."

Here's where it gets weird.

The waiting area at your local abortion franchisee has been re-designed into The Hub. To quote IDEO, "The Hub is an area that transforms the passive waiting room experience to a greeting area that's staffed by knowledgeable guides who help orient patients, and quiet nesting spaces for reflection and privacy. Patients can spend time with friends and family in a social, kid-friendly common area. …"

Yes, it's always great to have kids running around inside an abortion clinic.

After the abortion, patients are taken to nurturing recovery rooms.

"Soothing colors and soft, warm fabrics create a comforting environment," IDEO notes.

Keeping with the theme, a newly redesigned Planned Parenthood clinic in Queens, New York, showcases the use of comforting "Easter-egg" pastel-colored walls.

Color science and technology company X-Rite Pantone explains the importance of pastel colors:

"Fluffy yellow chicks …
Delicate pink tulips …
Soft green sprouts poking through the ground …

"Advertisers target our springtime emotions through pastel colors. Pastels have a calming effect, and everywhere you look companies are using them to feed our desire to feel a bit of spring."

Spring. Blossoming. Rebirth. Nesting. Abortion.

This, of course, has nothing to do with patient care and everything to do with marketing. The specific term for it is emotional branding.

"[E]motional branding is irrational," a 2014 article in AdWeek explains. "Simply playing somber music against images of people struggling without a particular product can trigger an irrational connection by playing on a consumer's sadness."

With Planned Parenthood, life tones and nurturing signals are meant to give its customers – the women they are intentionally deceiving – a positive "irrational connection" to the service being provided … murder of the living baby inside them.

All this is the abortionist equivalent of Pepsi-Cola ludicrously marketing "artisanal" craft soda.

The core problem McDonald's, Coke and Pepsi are struggling with is that their customers are not mindlessly consuming their unhealthy products anymore.

Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University, stated last fall that the biggest declines in soda consumption are currently being seen among more affluent white populations.

"Ms. Nestle said she expected that poor and minority customers would also reduce their soda intake over time, just as tobacco declines occurred first among educated consumers and then spread to a larger population," Margot Sanger-Katz wrote for the New York Times.

So it's fascinating to observe that another hugely profitable industry is facing this same pattern of decline: Big Abortion.

Eyal Press wrote in The New Yorker in 2014:

"As I noted in an article in the magazine on a troubled chain of clinics, the over-all abortion rate fell by 8 percent between 2000 and 2008 but rose among poor women by 18 percent. …

"The same report found that significant ethnic and racial differences existed even when controlling for income, with the rate of unintended pregnancies among minority women more than twice the rate among white women."

In short, just as with cigarettes and soda, better-educated and more affluent white potential customers are rejecting abortion.

If the pattern holds true, poor and minority women will follow suit after the unhealthy business becomes stigmatized in the public consciousness.

And then the butchers of Planned Parenthood will be all alone in their pretty pastel rooms.

Joe Schaeffer is a freelance writer based in Florida.