Abortion Ban Prompts ‘Pro-Life? Go Vegan’ Challenge Billboard
Saving All Lives Is a Great Choice, Says PETA
For Immediate Release:
May 15, 2019
Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382
In response to the pending Alabama bill that would make performing an abortion a Class A felony punishable by 10 to 99 years in prison, with no exceptions for those performed on rape or incest victims, PETA plans to place a billboard in Montgomery that proclaims, “Pro-Life? Go Vegan.”
“A great way to celebrate life is to leave baby animals off the plate and out of the carry-out box,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “Pigs, cows, and chickens are just weeks or months old when they’re slaughtered for a fleeting taste of flesh, and PETA’s billboard urges everyone to spare animals’ lives by eating vegan—without exceptions.”
In today’s meat industry, piglets are castrated without painkillers and chickens’ throats are cut while they’re still conscious at just 6 to 8 weeks of age. The majority of animals killed for human consumption never reach their first birthday.
The dairy industry is notorious for forced pregnancies: Cows are kept almost constantly pregnant through forcible insemination, and their beloved babies are taken away from them shortly after birth so that the milk meant for the calves can be sold to humans. Male calves are raised in cramped pens and then slaughtered for veal. In the egg industry, mother hens are forced to produce as many as 300 eggs per year, leading to ovarian carcinomas and other reproductive tumors, and are sent to the slaughterhouse once their bodies wear out. Their male babies, who are considered worthless by the industry, are tossed alive into grinders.
In addition to sparing nearly 200 animals a year daily suffering and a terrifying death, vegans have a greatly reduced risk of suffering from heart disease, obesity, cancer of the colon and breast, and diabetes.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. The group also plans to place the ad in Atlanta; Columbus, Ohio; Frankfort, Kentucky; Jackson, Mississippi; and Raleigh, North Carolina, following new abortion legislation in those states. For more information, visit PETA.org.
