The Anti-Tebow Super Bowl Commercial

Andrea Buchanan, writing for Vanity Fair:

If I had $2.5 million to spend, here’s the ad I would present to CBS’s standards and practices. You tell me if the network would run it.

My commercial would open with a wide shot of abortion protestors (many who are members of Focus on the Family) marching in front of the doors of a non-descript abortion clinic in anywhere U.S.A. I would show them shouting “baby killer” and “devil worshiper,” and depict images of them throwing holy water on the women who are attempting to walk through the doors and see a doctor. I would cast the commercial starting with the anti-Tebows: the unattractive, the unfit, the look of stark raving mad.

Then I would cut to Dr. George Tiller, the abortion provider who was murdered by Scott Roeder in June 2009. Tiller, like Tebow, was a devout Christian, and he never missed a Sunday service. He was shot pointblank range in front of his family while attending church in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas. The Super Bowl audience, while drinking their beers and eating their Doritos, would watch Tiller speaking directly into the camera about the women who come to see him and why they have to make these very difficult choices.


I interviewed Tiller back in 2004 while making a film called A Voice for Choice. I will never forget what I witnessed and the stories I heard when I visited his clinic. Tiller proudly displayed hundreds—if not thousands—of letters and cards from women all over the world as a testimony to those he helped to care for in great distress. His walls echoed the stories of gratitude from broken women who wrote about finally feeling whole again; women who would have taken their own lives had they been forced to give birth to their baby who was dying in their womb.

In my commercial, I would get close-ups of the women who named their babies and held funerals for them and still made the decision to abort because they were so malformed that they were missing hearts, lungs, or barely recognizable as a human being. I would cut to various women, speaking straight into camera, from all walks of life that have had to face a difficult choice to have abortions and hear first hand why they made that choice. We would see a gritty montage of women who have been raped and don’t want to keep a child, women who became pregnant after being penetrated by their father and have been brave enough to speak out and get help. Women who are homeless and can’t afford to keep the children they have, much less another child. Young women who had sex, got pregnant, and want to finish high school and go on to college. Women who are wealthy, educated, married, and simply don’t want another baby for whatever reason. The myriad of choices.

And then I would cut back to Tiller. I would show pictures of his family. Pictures of his church and congregation that loved him and I would ask for an interview with his wife and children. I would hear first hand about how much they miss their father and their husband. And then a final image in my Super Bowl commercial would be Scott Roeder, Tiller’s murderer, being carted off to jail, serving life in prison without a morsel of regret in his face. I would show his mother, who made the choice to give birth to Scott Roeder, just as Tim Tebow’s mother did. And at the end of my awesome, 30-second $2.5 million football commercial, I would say simply: "Not all babies end up football stars. Celebrate life. Celebrate family. Celebrate choice." 

There are too many things to take issue with in this short commercial "proposal", but I will make a few short comments. 

1.  Again, you have to make pro-choice people define what they mean by "choice".  The last two words that she writes are "Celebrate choice".  Would it be ok to write , "Celebrate murder"?  Why not?  Well, because some people don't think it is murder.  Why do they not think it is murder?  Because they assume that the fetus is non-human, or they think that it is human, but just not worthy of protection.  Why do they think that?   It is at this point that you can actually have something to work with in your argumentation. It is easy to show that the fetus is human (dogs have puppies, humans have babies) and it is easy to show that it should be protected, but you have to get them to define what "choice" really means.

2.  "Not all babies end up football stars. Celebrate life. Celebrate family. Celebrate choice." This is really a shocking statement that needs serious reflection.  Not all babies end up rich, healthy, successful, and beautiful.  Yes.  I agree.  Why in the world would that then give us the right to take their life as a human?  Who is to judge whether a life was "worthy" to have a chance?  Do you want anyone looking at your life and making a judgment about whether you live or die?  I don't.  So if someone has the potential to grow up  be an uncontributing member of society then we should have the right to kill them based on arbitrary reasons?  Huh?  Again, we have to ask, why not toddlers then?  If a woman has 8 kids, is on welfare, and is addicted to drugs, should she have the right to kill six of her kids?  Surely if she only has two kids those two would have a much higher chance of growing  up to be contributing members of society, right?  But we would never allow her to kill her kids, but we would allow her to have six abortions.  Why?

We have to answer the question, what is the main difference between those kids and the fetus.  Are those differences significant enough to say that it is ok to terminate the fetus and illegal to murder the kids.  Again, the toddler argument fits well here. 

Collin Brendemuehl deals with this issue very well here.  I pray that Andrea is speaking out of ignorance here and doesn't know how shockingly close she is to aligning herself to the philosophy of Nazi Germany.  People should have the right to be killed if their chances at "doing well in life" are deemed high.  Friends, think about what this woman is writing.  It is very scary, and I am not one to use that word lightly.  I am no fan of scare tactics to make a point, but this is the real deal.  "Not all babies end up football stars. Celebrate life. Celebrate family. Celebrate choice."