Yet another brouhaha is storming from Florida. It’s the second time I’ve used the word “brouhaha” in an article, but it’s fitting. It’s become a national debate on which commercials can be shown on television, and which can’t.
For those of you living in a cave, Tim Tebow recently graduated the University of Florida, where he was their star quarterback for three years, winner of a Heisman trophy, and leader of a team that won two national championships. A man of virtue, not afraid to be saving himself for marriage, not afraid to show the word his faith and love of Christ. He comes from a family of preachers and missionaries. It was on one such mission that he was born under difficult circumstances.
It seems that his mother Pam was on a mission in the Phillipines when she contracted a parisitic disease. She was pregnant with her fifth child and was counseled to have an abortion, because of all the medications she had to receive to combat her disease. She refused, and I suppose it wasn’t a difficult decision. She has strong faith and believes that God wouldn’t give her a challenge she couldn’t handle. And so baby Timothy was born, and grew up to be an incredible football player and a role model for our kids, both girls and boys. How to be mature and well-grounded while those around you threw admiration on your shoulders. He spent his spring breaks and summer vacations as a missionary in the Philippines, working beside his parents. He’s my son’s hero and I would never say a bad word about him. In this era of athletes in trouble with the law or cheating on their wives, it’s refreshing to know there is one man my son can look up to.
Now a pro-life group has produced a commercial, to run during the Super Bowl, about Pam’s experience and her belief that it was right to keep the baby that doctors wanted to abort. Her son is Tim Tebow, and how much better can that be? A lot of pro-choice groups are blasting CBS for agreeing to run the commercial. CBS’s thoughts on this came down to money. Show us a commercial in good taste and give us a check and we’ll run it during the Super Bowl. A gay men’s dating service submitted a commercial, which CBS—and hopefully a lot of other people in this country—would find distasteful. It has nothing to do about discrimination against gay people, as this dating service would like you to think. It’s not a gay issue, it’s a taste issue. Pam Tebow’s commercial celebrates life and the family; the dating service promotes promiscuity and sex. In this day and age, when HIV is rampant, it doesn’t seem like the best way for anyone to find a date.
When I was younger, I was pro-choice on the issue of abortion. Every woman has a choice how to treat her own body and she knows best. But I’ve never been in the position of being fourteen and pregnant, or in my twenties and addicted to crack. If I had become pregnant, I think I would have had the baby, even if it meant putting it up for adoption. Since then, I have found Christ and believe he is my Savior. I never thought a “fetus” was a baby until my first miscarriage. It’s amazing how attached you can become to a peanut-sized person. After three miscarriages, I had my son, who is now 11. It was a difficult pregnancy because I have lupus and struggled to thirty-three weeks before giving birth to my son who, miraculously, came out with no respiratory problems and a decent weight (5 lbs 4 oz). I prayed a lot during my pregnancy for my son to come through without defects from all the medications I took during my pregnancy. That I would make it far enough along that he would survive.
Now that I’m nearing 50 quickly, my views have changed on abortions. I still don’t feel I can speak for every woman in the world, but here in the United States, I find no reason for abortion, except in the case of rape or other horrible occurence. We have birth control available to everyone, including teenagers. We have classes in school to teach teenagers the responsibility of caring for a baby. We have adoption agencies willing to pay for all pregnancy-related expenses. Back when Pam Tebow was pregnant with Tim, none of these services were available. And she had already had four children. She knew what the odds were and went with God’s plan. I give her a lot of credit and admire her immensely. Her story made me wonder… if a baby is aborted, what was the plan for that child? What would he grow up to be? A doctor who finds the cure for cancer? The President of the United States? A teacher loved and admired by his students? The next Einstein?
We don’t know the answers.
