USA Today just can't move on. It's been over a week since the pro-life Tebow ad aired during the Superbowl - and it wasn't nearly as controversial as the liberals said it would be. Tim Tebow's mom said nice things about her son; Tim hugged her, both of them smiled, and that was it. Most people shrugged and forgot about it. But not USA Today. On Feb. 15, it's Faith & Reason section touted the headline "Tebow pro-family ad leads to surprising 'choice' message."
The article gave the tired argument that even if you're choosing life, it's still a choice. Pam Tebow "chose to ignore doctors" but she still had options open to her. Author of the article Cathy Lynn Grossman, however, painted Tebow's choice as both ignorant and selfish, since the pregnancy could have left her first four children motherless.
Ironically, Grossman's "Faith & Reason" blog didn't even mention that Pam Tebow did, in fact, understand the dangers - and has discussed them extensively -- but had faith that God would see it through. Grossman instead cited an article written by Slate's William Saletan titled "The Pro-life Case for Pregnancy Termination."
Saletan wrote about the Web site of Focus on the Family, the organization that sponsored the Tebow's Superbowl ad. He described the site as a "grim ward of doomed pregnancies" - stories of pregnancies where mothers endangered their own lives in order to give birth to "fatally defective fetuses." Both Saletan and Grossman concluded that perhaps God speaks through doctors and so, real faith means following their advice instead of your own beliefs.
According to Saletan, women should consider more "practical" decisions than Tebow's so that "you'll be there for your surviving children." "Practical," of course, refers to abortion.
Last year, however, a physician by the name of Colleen Malloy wrote a letter to the editor of Chicago Sun-Times, saying she was worried how journalists like Saletan depict abortion.
"Abortion performed to 'save' a mother's life almost never - if ever - is necessary," Malloy wrote. "Ireland - a country where the unborn child is constitutionally protected - has the lowest maternal death rate in the world. More than a decade ago, a group of Ireland's top obstetricians concluded that 'there are no medical circumstances justifying direct abortion, that is, no circumstances in which the life of a mother may only be saved by directly terminating the life of her unborn child.' The United Kingdom, on the other hand, where abortion is available practically on demand, has over five times Ireland's maternal death rate."
Both Saletan and Grossman also failed to mention that the majority of abortions have nothing to do with life-endangering pregnancies. According to a Guttmacher Institute survey, less than four percent of abortions in 2004 were performed to save the mother's life; 92 percent of them were simply because the pregnancy was inconvenient.
