'Choice' Means Allowing Women to Make a Different One

By Doug Patton

February 1, 2010

University of Florida quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother are about to learn the same lesson Todd and Sarah Palin and their family learned during the 2008 campaign. That lesson is that you had better not bring your pro-life message into the public square -- especially if you have lived it. That, of course, is what pro-abortion advocates fear most. Anyone willing to make the sacrifice to give life to someone society would just as soon discard threatens the order of things for them.

Like Sarah Palin's fifth baby, Trig, Tim Tebow would never have been born had so-called pro-choice advocates had their way. Tim's mother, Pam Tebow, was a missionary in the Philippines when she was pregnant with him in 1987. Tim was also her fifth baby. When Pam Tebow became ill during the pregnancy, her doctor advised her to have an abortion. She chose instead to give her baby life, and that baby grew up to be perhaps one of the finest athletes of his generation.

During this year's Super Bowl, Pam Tebow will appear in a commercial celebrating her decision to give her son life, and this has liberals in a snit. After all, no one is supposed to challenge the orthodoxy of the Left. The spot is sponsored by Focus on the Family, one of the finest pro-family organizations in the country. Founded more than thirty years ago by Dr. James Dobson, this group has worked tirelessly to promote life and the family in America, but to hear the pro-abortion radicals on the left talk, one would think that the organization was some sort of Nazi hate group devoted to destroying anyone who disagrees with them. They have been called "divisive" because they believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman and that life begins at conception and should end at natural death. What radical concepts.

One leftist wag called Focus "a Christian hate group." Another called them "anti-choice." But it is the other side that is decidedly "anti-choice" because the only choice acceptable to them is abortion. Women like Pam Tebow and Sarah Palin are supposed to make the choice to kill their babies, and when they don't, they become a threat to the whole house of cards that the abortion rights movement has always been.

A coalition of narrow-minded liberal groups led by the New York-based Women's Media Center, backed by the National Organization for Women (which purports to speak for all American women despite the fact that their membership numbers are in the low six figures), the Feminist Majority Foundation and other groups, urged CBS to scrap the Tebow ad. "An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year -- an event designed to bring Americans together," said Jehmu Greene, president of the Women's Media Center.

Television's cruelest dimwit, Joy Behar, pointed out that Tim Tebow could just as easily grown up to be a rapist pedophile. Apparently, on the strength of that possibility, Pam Tebow should have aborted baby Tim while she had the chance.

The truth, of course, is that it is the left that hates anyone who dares to show the world that there is another alternative to the cheap, cowardly shortcut of abortion. Their pro-death dogma, masquerading as "the right to choose," has created a climate where traditional values and a reverence for life are now considered "controversial." When those with a different worldview live out their values and celebrate their choice, they are vilified, mocked, disdained and despised. And they call us hateful.

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Doug Patton is a former speechwriter and public policy advisor who now works as a freelance writer. His weekly columns appear in newspapers across the country and on various Internet websites, including Human Events Online and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers can e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net.