Tim Tebow Super Bowl Ad: Food for Thought on Women’s Rights

9 February 2010 - The much anticipated Tim Tebow pro-life ad aired on US TV stations during the Super Bowl (but not on Canadian cable channels that substituted Canadian advertisements). It proved to be a gentle light-hearted show of affection between Pam Tebow and the son she was advised to abort, Tim Tebow, who grew up to be an award-winning football player. The reactions of Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women (NOW), which opposed the ad as being “anti-choice,” give us an opportunity to reflect on the rights of women to be told the truth.

In the ad, Pam Tebow talks of how she nearly lost Tim more than once during the pregnancy and reflects on how tough a time it was. Looking at the size of Tim now, it’s hard to picture him as a baby.

As she talks, Tim appears to knock her to the ground with a (computer-faked) flying tackle. She pops back up to tell her son “You’re not nearly as tough as I am.” The ad closes by inviting viewers to visit the Focus on the Family website for her full story.

Every woman is valued

Prior to the release of the ad, Planned Parenthood issued a video as a rebuttal, featuring two other star athletes, football player Sean James and Olympic gold medallist Al Joyner.

Sean James says, “We’re working towards the day when every woman will be valued and every woman’s decision about her health and her family will be respected.” Al Joyner adds, “I want my daughter to live in a world were everyone’s decision are respected.”

The clear implication is that pro-lifers do not value women and respect their decisions as much as Planned Parenthood does. Well, the truth is we do value women and respect their decision-making.

Every woman’s right to know

We value them so much that we believe a woman has the right to full, accurate and honest information to enable her to make fully-informed decisions. We know that such information is not coming from Planned Parenthood or its Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, which both persist in denying the harmful effects of abortion, such as the increased risk of breast cancer.

We know from experience and research that when given the full facts about life in the womb, about the health risks of abortion and about all her options and the services available to help women in crisis pregnancies carry their babies to full term, most say “yes” to their babies’ lives and to their own health.

NOW silliness

Once the ad was aired and seen to be innocuous, the National Organization for Women (NOW) resorted to silliness to find something to criticize. NOW president Terry O’Neill told the LA Times she was “blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it,” referring to Tim’s “tackle” of his mum. Well, the Snickers candy bar people had an ad in which Betty White and Abe Vigoa were also thrown to the ground by tackles. About that the NOW website says: “the joke of this ad really is on women and old people — how lame we are physically and how funny it is when we go boom.”

What went “boom” is NOW, the sound of its double-standard blowing up in its face.

Tom Kelly, Executive Dirtector

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What Babies Hear in the Womb

Many mothers know for sure that their babies hear and react to their voices and even to music while in the womb, and now scientists in Germany and Ireland have caught up with them.

When my wife Mary was pregnant with our son Dan, our fourth child, she went through a period of stress and anxiety, and to calm her and give her an emotional and spiritual comfort, she used to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Later, as a lively little boy, whenever she played it again Dan would stop leaping around the house and lie down to listen.

When he was about seven, Mary had read about research done on babies being able to hear in the womb and as an experiment she took Dan into the bedroom and asked him to listen to some music and tell her what he thought. She put on the Four Seasons and left him looking a little puzzled. When she came back in, he was lying on the bed in the fetal position and he said, “I kind of remember that music but I don’t know why.

A recent study of babies in Ireland showed that “babies with normal hearing start moving in reaction to sound around 16 weeks gestational age.” This is earlier than previous estimates and about two months before the baby’s ear is completely formed. Babies react to music and even “begin learning the mother’s native language . . .while in the womb,” according to the scientists’ report to the Association for Pre- & Perinatal Psychology and Health (www.birthpsychology.com).

In Germany, researchers at the University of Würzburg studied the cries of 60 newborns three to five days old, 30 from French families and 30 from German. They found that the way babies hear their mothers’ voices is related to how they hear music before birth.

French speaking people use a rising melodic pattern in their language, while Germn speaking people prefer a falling pattern. Their babies show they same preference: French babies in the research cried with a rising pattern and German babies with a falling pattern.

How babies imitate melodic patterns relies on only a command of their voice-boxes developed before birth, researcher Kathkeen Wermke told the website Live Science (www.livescience.com).

Statistics Canada says that more than 3,000 abortions are performed each year in Canada on babies at 16 weeks, when they are already learning their mothers’ voices.

Tom Kelly, Executive Director

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The Joy of Life at Christmas

There’s a certain joy to be felt when working for pro-life, even though we are surrounded by abortion and euthanasia and they don’t seem to be going away. It comes, I believe, from the faith that one day the culture of death will be vanquished by the culture of Life, and each of us — every volunteer, every worker, every donor, every pray-er — will have played a part pleasing to God.

Tom Kelly, Executive Director