Nearly two years after first offering a Pro-Life app in the app store, Apple has pulled the Human Coalition app citing customer complaints as the reason.
Once again, the pro-life community is being persecuted. The Human Coalition is a collective of individuals, groups, and churches who are dedicated to championing life in America, based in the Bible belt area of Frisco, Texas. According to their website, their mission is to ‘transform our culture of death into a culture of life’ and to end abortion in America once and for all.
The Human Coalition app, which is still available to Android users, allows pro-life individuals, companies, churches, and groups to pray for clients from their six targeted areas who are seeking an abortion. At this writing, there have been over 7,500 babies rescued as a direct result of these prayers. Their testimonies are powerful, and are evidence of the power of prayer for good. Many of these women want to keep their children, but others in their lives (spouse, parents, etc.) are pressuring them to choose abortion over their child’s life.
This sounds like just the sort of application we should be able to find at the app store where, according to Apple’s CEO in a post-Trump election announcement in late 2016, the company is supportive of diversity, including political thought. In a statement to his company, Cook wrote:
Our products connect people everywhere, and they provide the tools for our customers to do great things to improve their lives and the world at large. Our company is open to all, and we celebrate the diversity of our team here in the United States and around the world– regardless of what they look lie, where they come from, how they worship or who they love.
This was what Cook put forth as his and the company’s position, yet Apple has now joined other influential media giants such as Twitter and YouTube in pushing back from conservative and Christian groups in favor of extreme secular organizations. They join the ranks of such recent actions as Google’s firing of James Damore for questioning the company’s stringent social justice structure.
Of course, Apple is far from the first Silicon Valley giant to alienate Americans with a traditionalist slant. A former Facebook journalist even admitted that the company routinely suppresses conservative voices and trending news. LifeSite News, a conservative non-profit internet service dedicated to cultural and familial issues reported that its app came under attack by public criticism fueled by writers from publications such as Slate and The Statesman, over the summer of 2017. These writers made fun of the app’s purpose, mocking the power of Christians praying for each other and believing in the power of prayer as ludicrous.
In a Slate article, Christina Cauterucci mocked the Coalition and its app, writing:
“With the help of an app developed by the anti-abortion Human Coalition, it was easy! I saved real-live babies from the clutches of money-grubbing abortion providers with just a couple dozen swipes of my right thumb, as if I were paging through Tinder or wiping a little schmutz off the screen of my phone.
You too can be a baby-saving hero. Your superpower awaits at your favored app store, searchable under ‘Human Coalition.’”
In a statement to LifeNews, Human Coalition confirmed that in July, around the time of the huge pro-abortion pushback mentioned above, Apple had notified the company that they had removed the app because of certain functionality violations. When they provided proof and demonstrated that the requirements had in fact been met, and in fact exceeded the minimum requirements to function, Apple was unwilling to identify a specific improvement and instead listed requirements that would amount to a complete cost-prohibitive overhaul to the application.
There seems to be a lot of pro-life censorship in the air right now. ChristianHeadlines.com just recently reported a similar action taken by Twitter who reportedly pulled a campaign ad which included condemnation of Planned Parenthood.
Think it not strange Believers. Jesus told us in John 15:18-19:
If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
~ 1776 Christian
