The Campaign

“Poems from the Womb” gives voice to the unborn innocent baby girl who imagines what she would say to her mummy once she is born. The poems start with a hopeful outlook, but take a chilling turn when you realize that this child will never have the life she’s dreaming of. It’s a poignant reminder that all her love, hopes and dreams will never come to pass, because she will never see the world, life, nor her mother’s face.

Creative Execution

To create greater empathy for an unborn baby girl, we produced a series of poems in her voice and released them first as 4 radio spots. The radio directed the listener to a mobile site called ‘Poems from the Womb’ where they could view and share the poems. On the site, the poems were illustrated in a whimiscal children’s book style. To create the illustrations, we worked with international children’s book illustrator, Catia Chen. The imagery and writing led parents to believe that these were real children’s books. Which made the graually darker tone even more shocking. At the end of the book, parents are directed to stopthegendercide.com to find out more about the cause.

The campaign objective was to raise awareness and bring more eyeballs to stopthegendercide.com. The response was overwhelming. The mobile site received over 250,000 visitors in the first month alone. 63% of the people who viewed the books online, shared them on Facebook or Twitter. Without any additional awareness activity, traffic to the site increased by 250%.

In most of these countries, the preference for boys over girls is rooted in culture and ancient tradition. But with the widespread and inexpensive availability of ultrasound technology, Asian couples are now discovering the gender of their unborn baby and aborting if it is female. We conducted our own research with 70 expecting couples across middle-income groups in India and China, and we found something much more alarming. In middle-class households, sex-selective abortion is increasingly being seen as the socially-acceptable alternative to infanticide (a practice that is still prevalent in rural parts of these countries). A fetus is not seen as a life, and aborting it is almost deemed humane. Our task became clear. We needed to get parents to connect to the unborn child just as much as they would while cradling a newborn in their arms. From here, ‘Poems from the Womb’ was born.