Advertising and women's health. Where should the line be drawn?

It is not surprising to find politicians often use fear as a tactic to win political campaigns. Fear has always been a strategic tactic in convincing others to follow you, which can be seen in examples like WWII, the American occupation of Iraq, and the Cold War to name a few. Fear is such an important emotion to humans and crucial in our need for survival and order; it is no wonder that political parties would use it for their own gain.

Recently women’s health has become a battleground for conflicting ideologies between political parties. By using scare tactics, they can play on the fear of women who face such life altering diseases like cancer and their survival to sway voter’s opinions about issues like health care and health care reform.

This happened recently with an ad ran by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a nonprofit organization that considered themselves both conservative and Republican. This group recently ran an ad that uses fear tactics to try and sway women to vote differently on the health care reform bill. By using a breast cancer survivor as their spokesperson they comment that if Washington offers a federally ran health program then thousand of women will die from diseases like breast cancer. They also comment that countries like England, which has a public health care option, has a higher death rate than the United States, which is irresponsible and false.

Looking at factchecker.org (link refdirects to original article), a project of the Annenberg public policy center, they actually spoke to an epidemiologist with the cancer society told us that the way the figures used in the ads were calculated "really faulty” and

In addition, they stated:

-The ad uses outdated survival rate statistics. More recent numbers show England’s survival rate to be closing the gap with that of the United States.

-Experts with the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute told us that mortality rates provide a much more accurate comparison.

-And the mortality rates for breast cancer for the two countries are similar.

Here is the ad in question:




Now why do you think they would use women as a way to win votes? Also do you think it is fair for political parties to use ads like these to push their own agenda? In fact who are we really hurting with ads like these? We hurt the thousand of women who battle breast cancer and the programs that would help in finding a cure. it's horrible that they would use such a serious issue as a way to end the health reform bill.