Four middle-aged women stood in the rain in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bremerton Saturday, March 17. They hunkered under their umbrellas, holding signs that read “Women Deserve Better than Abortion.” The protest was part of a 40-day vigil by a group called Kitsap Human Life, which kicked off its campaign against Planned Parenthood with a large advertisement in the Kitsap Sun charging that Planned Parenthood uses tax dollars to promote abortion. Subsequent ads, published in a number of Kitsap County papers, claimed that abortion leads to teen suicide, that Planned Parenthood lies about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing STDs and pregnancy, that Planned Parenthood performs abortions on girls as young as 11, and that a book endorsed by Planned Parenthood for sex-education classes shows illustrations of people having sex.
The group’s latest ad, which ran in the Kitsap Sun March 8, contends that Planned Parenthood has refused to report cases of statutory rape to authorities. Donna Etchey, publisher of the North Kitsap Herald (which refused to print the rape ad) said she was worried the claims in the ads might amount to libel. “I even called up child support services and the local sheriff to check out the information.” Planned Parenthood is not required to ask the age of a minor’s sexual partner.
The Kitsap Sun has since refused to publish both the rape ad and the teen-suicide ad. The advertising manager at the Kitsap Sun said he wasn’t worried about libel, but acknowledged that the paper shouldn’t have run an ad with questionable claims about a third party. Both newspapers have now instituted a policy that Kitsap Human Life must submit its ads for review a week ahead of time.
Glenn Stockton, a member of Kitsap Human Life, who was at Saturday’s protest, called the papers’ decision “censorship.”
Human Life president Jack McGowan said they intended for the ads to provoke a reaction. “We hope to bring people into a dialogue about the value of human life, but first we have to whack them over the head a bit,” he said.
Planned Parenthood is not considering charges against either the group or the newspapers. 
This article has confused several separate organizations and activities. The ’40 Days for Life’ campaign was not organized by Kitsap Human Life; it is a national campaign (held at 9 sites in Washington State alone) of peaceful prayer and witness at abortion ‘clinics’. The ads by KHL are simply an ongoing effort by that organization, not 40DFL, to educate the public on the dangers of abortion to individuals and to society as a whole, and in fact their ads are truth. It’s unfortunate that so many newspapers, either out of fear or bias, refuse to let their readership hear the negatives about abortion and the facts about Planned Parenthood – on the latter subject, just do a little research on what PP’s founder, Margaret Sanger, intended the organization to do.