Life Links 2/1/10

Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman offer some advice to pro-choice groups on how to learn a lesson from Focus of Family’s prolife ad featuring Pam and Tim Tebow.

For abortion rights supporters, picking on Tim Tebow and his mom is not the way to go. Instead of trying to block or criticize the Focus on the Family ad, the pro-choice movement needs its own Super Bowl strategy. People want to be inspired, and abortion is as tough and courageous a decision as is the decision to continue a pregnancy. But the conversation is being led by Focus on the Family and its quarterback ambassador. It's a high-profile example of the savvy way the antiabortion movement has tailored its message.

Interestingly, it appears neither of them knew Tim Tebow was born in the Philliphines where abortion is illegal.

Pam Tebow was indeed courageous and had the legal right to choose, a point the pro-choice movement can readily make in response to the ad.

They also note how science has played a role in making people more prolife.


The New York Times also thinks the reaction of pro-choice groups to the Tebow ad is “puzzling and dismaying.”

A letter sent to CBS by the Women’s Media Center and other groups argues that the commercial “uses one family’s story to dictate morality to the American public, and encourages young women to disregard medical advice, putting their lives at risk” — a lame attempt to portray the ad as life-threatening.

CatholicEducation.org has Professor Robert George’s comments at the March for Life’s Rose Dinner.

Of course, from the pro-life vantage point, success on the judicial front is only the prelude to the larger political struggle over abortion. If Roe is reversed, the result will be to return the matter to the domain of ordinary democratic deliberation for resolution by the state legislatures or the Congress. The burden will then be on the pro-life movement to win the struggle for the soul of the nation. We must, with God's help, persuade our fellow citizens to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence by bringing the unborn fully within the protection of our laws.

A local prolife group in Canada will air an ad on local television featuring images of aborted children.