Tim Tebow Ad

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: The already-infamous ‘Tim Tebow Anti-Abortion’ Superbowl ad hasn’t even aired yet, but it’s already stirred up plenty of controversy.

The ad purportedly involves Tebow’s mother telling the story of how she became ill while she was pregnant with him and was urged by doctors to have an abortion for her own safety. As the legend goes, she chose not to listen to their recommendations, and gave birth to a baby who grew up to be named Florida’s Mr. Football, which is every mother’s dream.

The subtext of this ad demonstrates a relatively new approach for the anti-abortion set, and I have to say I’m impressed. Their normal tactics are usually about as subtle as a slap in the uterus. But the premise of this Mother Tebow ad appears to dig a little deeper, at least on the surface. Its view is a bit more nuanced; more thoughtful. It shows the consequences of an enormous and difficult life decision, and demonstrates one situation in which a woman’s choice to go through with a pregnancy results in a positive outcome. At least, if your definition of a positive outcome involves the existence of Tim Tebow. I’m on the fence there.

It should be noted that Tim Tebow’s mother ostensibly wanted to give birth so badly that she was willing to risk her life to carry her pregnancy to term. This places her apart from a majority of women who seek to terminate their pregnancies because they did not plan them and either can’t afford or do not want to have a child. It should also be noted that Mrs. Tebow already had four children when she was pregnant with Tim. It is unlikely that the ad focuses on the fact that she would have left four children motherless if she had died as a result of her commitment to bringing Tim Tebow into the world and thus into the Florida Gators.

No, the brilliant part of this ad is not what it glosses over, but that it targets with laser precision a dread that I have come to believe lurks in the reptilian brain of every anti-abortionist, and even some who are pro-choice: the irrational fear that if their mothers had had the option to choose not to give birth to them, they wouldn’t be alive today. Scary, right? Makes you think? Not really.

I personally am a very analytical person. I tend to over-think everything, from what I should do with my career to what I should have for lunch. But I do not now, nor have I ever, nor WILL I ever wonder what the world would have been like if my mother had aborted me. Because really, what’s the point? Obviously I was born. That’s that. Why pursue such vague and disturbing and ultimately useless what-ifs? Either you’re born, or you’re not, and if one happened, there’s no way to know what it would have been like if the other had happened instead, so why waste your time thinking about it?

Yet many do. The fact that their mothers held incredible power over their lives and could have made a choice not to bring them into this world haunts them. It keeps them up at night. They may not even realize it, but by picketing planned parenthood clinics and harassing young pregnant women and creating pro-life propaganda, they aren’t only fighting to save unborn babies they know nothing about; they’re fighting, in some strange way, to save themselves, and to take away the choice that every mother should have to carry a child to term or not, so that they can rest assured that their lives never hung in the balance, the way Tim Tebow’s could have (but ultimately didn’t).

The flip side of the coin of course is that for every Mrs. Tebow there was also a Mrs. Dahmer. It’s hard to argue that the world is a better place because Tim Tebow is in it, without also reflecting that the world would have also been a better place if Pol Pot’s mother had had second thoughts during her first trimester. This pointless line of thinking; this attribution of some greater design to past incidents which relied heavily on chance and circumstance, leads to murkiness, not clarity.

I’ll be curious to see reactions to this ad once it finally airs. Although I find every argument against allowing women the freedom to choose to be unconvincing, I’ve got to give this ad credit for tapping into an inexplicable and profound dread of the anti-abortionist movement. Tim Tebow, not only did you grace the September 2008 cover of Men’s Fitness magazine, but you’re also about to become the poster child of our deepest fears. Do your mama proud!

JEFF MORROW: There are all sorts of reasons to dislike CBS’s decision to air the Tebow ad. CBS’s policy on advocacy ads appears to have been implemented in lopsided fashion, and the ad is financed by Focus on the Family, whose founder trades largely in religious hate speech. But the content of the ad, taken on its own terms, is not one of them.

I live in Washington, D.C. which regularly sees large-scale public demonstration by pro-life (and pro-choice) advocates, and rarely do they take seriously the internal validity of their opponents’ beliefs. Of course, at core is a somewhat intractable conflict of belief, but this is often taken as a license to give up on reasoned discourse.

Sometimes that’s a play for the base and visceral. In D.C., that’s the “fetus truck,” a rolling billboard with photographs of late-term aborted fetuses. It’s revolting, and it’s meant to be, but it contributes no more to the discourse than an equally revolting “appendectomy truck” or “triple-bypass truck” might. Sometimes, on the other side of the unproductive spectrum, it’s pseudoscience, a back-and-forth over whether abortion is linked to, causes, or has been spotted hanging out with depression or cancer. These are all invitations for people to speak completely past one another, but to attempt to do so more loudly.

The Tebow ad, on the other hand, appears to place the discussion where all sides can engage as humans. The ad has not aired yet, but my understanding is that it’s free from legal recommendations, presentations of science, or appeals to the divine. It simply says, that if you choose not to have a particular baby, you might regret it, because you might have liked that baby.

For a pro-life ad, that’s a pretty pro-choice message. After all, you can’t regret what you never had the chance to choose. The ad seems to acknowledge that its target audience has a choice, and that abortion might be that choice, but that there are reasons to consider not having an abortion. It wants to change your mind without changing your faith, your understanding of science, or your laws.

What makes it uncomfortable is that it cuts right to the core of any person’s concern in that situation: what if this is a mistake? You can, as Molly does, address that question head-on. Like Molly—and probably unlike the Tebows—I believe there are circumstances in which it would not be a mistake. But it’s a reasonable discussion to be had, one that everyone faced with the choice likely encounters. (Context is also everything, of course. There’s a difference between playing this ad during the Superbowl, and playing it at crisis pregnancy centers.)

Slate’s William Saletan criticizes the ad for underselling the risks in Tebow’s situation, and I trust his assessment of the facts. But the ad doesn’t strike me as advocating something so narrow as “if you ride our placental abruption, it will all work out” or even “disregard your doctor.” It strikes me as saying much more broadly, especially to people in less medically dire scenarios, “Hey, consider this possible outcome, too.”

That’s probably a softer sell than any of the other Superbowl ads.

Tags: Abortion, advertisement, Florida Gators, Football, Men's Magazine, pro-choice, Superbowl, Tim Tebow

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Arts & Culture, News & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.