Facebook rejected an ad this week that disputed scientifically unsound claims that abortion can cause higher instances of breast cancer, arguing that the advertisement violated the company’s guidelines “by advertising adult products or services, including toys, videos, or sexual enhancement products.” The news comes as a coalition of sexual violence prevention and women’s equality organizations are pressuring Facebook to take a stronger stance in favor of women’s health and crackdown against messages that “trivialize or glorify” violence against women.

“I’m a big supporter of that campaign,” Michelle Kinsey Bruns, the online manager of Women’s Media Center and the creator of the ad, told ThinkProgress in a telephone interview on Saturday morning. The ad linked to a page on the National Cancer Institute website reassuring women that “having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.”

The rejected ad via Kinsey Bruns’ Twitter handle @ClinicEscort:

Kinsey Bruns said she expected Facebook to disapprove of the ad, but submitted it anyway to highlight what she described as “the absolute inconsistency that Facebook is willing to apply to a woman’s body as an object of violence, but a woman’s body as a medical object is too scandalous to be approved.”

Indeed, the company has come under criticism for removing images of “mastectomies, breastfeeding mothers, and other non-sexualized depictions of women’s bodies” and labeling them as “pornographic,” while allowing photographs and forums that make light of abusing and raping women. That content often falls under the “humor” section of Facebook’s content guidelines. Activists are encouraging companies that advertise with Facebook to boycott the company until they can be assured their ads will not appear next to content that promotes sexual violence and abuse.

Kinsey Bruns submitted a similar breast cancer ad last year, with an illustration of a woman touching her breast, but it too was rejected. She says she plans to experiment more with the company’s guidelines, posting ads with celebrities like Nicki Minaj in outrageous clothing or showing “sideboob” to test the boundaries and inconsistencies of the media giant’s standards.

Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines state, “Ads may not promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including but not limited to toys, videos, publications, live shows, or sexual enhancement products. Ads for family planning and contraception are allowed provided they follow the appropriate targeting requirements.”

While pregnant teens are being shamed for making bad choices in the US, a new ad campaign in Britain is tackling the other side of the spectrum with an arresting image of a pregnant old woman. The campaign, sponsored by the pregnancy testing company First Response, purports to warn young women that their childbearing years are numbered.

The average British woman bears her first child at age 30, 5 years later than American women. In the name of “provok[ing] a debate about how old is too old to have a baby,” First Response Get Britain Fertile had make-up artists transform 45-year-old British TV presenter Kate Garraway into a cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.

Yet even as First Response claims there is a lack of awareness about the female biological clock, they tout a survey by YouGov finding 70 percent of British women believe having a baby in her 40s would be too old. Women were also quite clear about their motives to wait: two-fifths said they would delay having a child until they have financial stability, while over a third said the cost of childcare is a deterrent. Another third said they would wait until they found the right partner.

Nevertheless, First Response has decided the solution to the trend of women waiting longer to have children is to criticize them, prey on their fears of aging, and exploit social disgust for even moderately sexual old women.

Get Britain Fertile ambassadors Garraway and Zita West insist that they are not trying to push women into a panic over their ticking fertility clocks. Yet the campaign, which officially launches June 3, would do well to extend beyond the caricature of the old woman. Thus far, First Response has not suggested they will explore ways to bridge the vast disparity between the average cost of raising a child — roughly half a million dollars in the US, not including college tuition — and the employment prospects of the average 25-year-old couple. In the US, the average college-educated 20-something earns $45,000 a year, while their unemployment rate is far higher than their older counterparts. Highly-educated young people are also increasingly finding it difficult to find jobs that match their very expensive education. In the UK, two-fifths of all unemployed people are younger than 25. Nor does the campaign touch on the UK’s childcare costs, which are the second highest in the world.

Rather than address these real fiscal issues young women explicitly say are keeping them from having children earlier, Garraway writes that women are simply being too picky about settling down with the right partner: “I’m not suggesting for a minute that you settle for the first half-decent man who comes along – every woman has the right to hold out for Mr Right – but you may find that really addressing your feelings about having a family means the man you thought was Mr Right comes in a different form. I suppose the word for it is mindfulness.”

This advice ignores the far higher divorce rates among people who married younger than 30. In the UK, the divorce rate hit a 40-year low last year as couples delay marriage til age 30 or later.

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As Congress debates comprehensive immigration reform, members of both parties have insisted on barring undocumented immigrants who achieve provisional legal status from receiving Medicaid coverage or Obamacare subsidies (a provision that was already part of the health law). But preventing these immigrants from gaining basic health benefits is actually a fiscally irresponsible model that will only raise health care spending and contribute to a sicker U.S. population.

The common argument against providing health care to undocumented immigrants is that, since they’ve broken the law, they should be punished. A part of that punishment involves denying them health care services through public entitlement programs or federal subsidies that are dependent on Americans’ tax dollars. “We must value the contribution of immigrants to our country. In doing so, we must protect our borders, we must protect our workers, and we must protect the taxpayer,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Thursday.

But the taxpayer already foots the bill for undocumented immigrants’ care — just in an incredibly inefficient and half-baked way. Under the auspices of the Reagan-era Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), hospital emergency rooms can’t turn away patients based on their citizenship or insurance status. That doesn’t mean that their care magically becomes free — undocumented men and women who use the emergency room are still slapped with a hefty hospital bill.

However, if they are unable to pay that bill — which is fairly likely considering that they probably don’t have any insurance — then a combination of the federal government, state governments, hospitals, and other American consumers of U.S. health care are forced to absorb the cost. In turn, that raises prices for medical services, since hospitals want to recoup some of their losses. Some studies have estimated the price of subsidizing undocumented immigrants’ health care at about $10.7 billion per year.

The federal government has long been aware of this problem. In fact, soon after EMTALA’s passage, lawmakers authorized a special Medicaid fund that mostly goes towards subsidizing emergency treatments for undocumented immigrants. The program costs about $2 billion per year, and most of that money is used on delivering babies for pregnant, undocumented women who go to the emergency room.

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Republican Party of Virginia Treasurer Bob FitzSimmonds, a former aide to and “very close friend” of gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli II (R), told Virginia blogger Ben Tribbett that he is “not a big fan of contraception, frankly.”

FitzSimmonds — who was Cuccinelli’s legislative director during his time in the Virginia Senate, as well as a multiple-time state senate candidate himself — is the former executive director of what is now the Care Net Pregnancy Help Center and the former chair of the Virginia Crisis Pregnancy Center Directors Association. Crisis Pregnancy Centers are faith-based operations that seek to discourage pregnant women from considering abortion. He created an abstinence-only curriculum for area schools called the “Keep It Simple Say NO abstinence program“.

At last weekend’s state party convention, Tribbett asked FitzSimmon whether he supported the distribution of emergency contraception on college campuses. “I’m not a big fan of contraception, frankly,” the Republican Party official explained. “I think there are some issues, we’re giving morning-after pills to 12-year-olds, and pretty soon I guess we’ll hand them out to babies, I don’t know.”

Watch the video:

FitzSimmonds also told Tribbett that sex education has caused the spread of sexually transmitted diseases: “I believe that we don’t recognize the causal effect between the type of sex education that we’ve been giving and the spread of STDs. We focus on things like abortion, cause it’s a big pressure thing. I go into schools 15-20 times a year, I run a non-profit that goes into schools and talks to kids about sex. They’re all abortion and HIV. HIV’s kind of hard to catch. Abortion happens if you get pregnant. But we’re on the track for 50 percent of the American people to have Herpes by the time these kids are my age. And that is a profound — not only health but sociological crisis facing this country.”

FitzSimmonds posted on his Facebook page shortly after last November’s election, “When Obama is 90 years old and he dies and goes to Hell, he is going to say ‘This is all Bush’s fault.’”

(HT: BlueVirginia)