The National Organization for Women has protested the decision of CBS to allow a pro-life ad from Focus on the Family to air during the Super Bowl game. The ad features Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam. Pam returned the kickoff of a life-threatening pregnancy to put Tim in the red zone for claiming that Heisman trophy. NOW has called on CBS to dump the ad, prompting Sarah Palin – currently the starting quarterback of the pro-life team, and a player with serious skin in the game – to respond with a characteristically bold forward pass from her Facebook pocket:

What a ridiculous situation they’re getting themselves into now with their protest of CBS airing a pro-life ad during the upcoming Super Bowl game. The ad will feature Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mom, and they’ll speak to the sanctity of life and the beautiful potential within every innocent child as Mrs. Tebow acknowledges her choice to give Tim life, despite less than ideal circumstances. Messages like this empower women! This speaks to the strength and commitment and nurturing spirit within women. The message says everything positive and nothing negative about the power of women – and life. Evidently, some women’s rights groups like NOW do not like that message.

NOW president Terry O’Neill says Palin is missing the point:

The goal of the Focus on the Family ad is not to empower women. It’s to create a climate in which Roe v. Wade can be overturned. There are always going to be women who need abortions. In this country, one in three women will have an abortion.

So, the point is that people who think Roe vs. Wade should be overturned lose their right to free speech? Does this principle apply to all Supreme Court decisions? If so, I guess we’d better get started on the Obama impeachment hearings, after the embarrassing disrespect he showed the Supreme Court during the State of the Union address.

It’s nostalgic to read a press release from NOW again. The organization was last seen sinking into the bubbling tar of the Clinton impeachment saga, babbling incomprehensibly about how sexual harassment really isn’t such a big deal when pro-abortion Democrat presidents do it. Like every appendage of the socialist state, NOW has no principle beyond fealty to the political party that grants it power, and the Democrats used to grant them a remarkable amount of power – enough to end the careers of Navy officers and combat pilots, after “investigations” that stopped just short of waterboarding. When NOW talks about “empowering” women, it speaks in the collective sense. Empowerment comes from obedience to feminist organizations, which use that power to drag an oversized chair up to the grim carving table where the Democrat Party wields its redistibutionist cleavers.

Some critics cite unquestioning support for unrestricted abortion rights as the primary demonstration of loyalty power feminists seek from their supporters, but the NOW offensive against the Tebow ad, and their response to Sarah Palin, suggest the true sacrament of radical feminism is not abortion… it’s opposition to the pro-life movement. Power in a collectivist system comes from tribal loyalty, and hatred is a powerful glue for holding collectives together. As with leftist racial groups, NOW has very little positive to offer its supporters these days, so it thrives by pointing fingers at its enemies. Religious people in general, and outspoken pro-life advocates in particular, look very good on the business end of a trembling finger.

The Tebow ad will not call for the overturn of Roe vs. Wade. It’s meant to be a heartfelt endorsement of life, from a mother who chose it against the recommendation of doctors, in the face of her own suffering and possible death. As Palin says:

NOW is looking at the pro-life issue backwards. Women should be reminded that they are strong enough and smart enough to make decisions that allow for career and educational opportunities while still giving their babies a chance at life. In my own home, my daughter Bristol has also been challenged by pro-abortion “women’s rights” groups who don’t agree with her decision to have her baby, nor do they like the abstinence message which she articulated as her personal commitment.

My own opposition to abortion-on-demand is not religious in nature. I believe there aren’t enough people in the world. The decision to deny a human being his, or her, opportunity to enter the living world and make the choices that compose a lifetime should never be made lightly. For people of religious faith, the exercise of free will was a parting gift to creation from its Author. For the atheist, the expanding nova of human choice brings light and meaning into a universe of cold dust and searing plasma. Either way, life is precious, and it follows that those who follow Pam Tebow’s path are worthy of respect. How can we render that respect, if we insist her choice was absolutely equivalent to terminating little Tim, right up to the moment when his head emerged from the birth canal?

We’re nowhere near the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, a naked exercise of raw judicial power… which is apparently so fragile that a son thanking his mother for the gift of life could tear it to shreds. I wonder how many of the other iron laws supporting statism are actually written on tissue paper. If Roe were repealed, the question of abortion restrictions would return to the states, and people contemplating the examples of Sarah Palin, Bristol Palin, and Pam Tebow would gain the dangerous freedom to express their beliefs through smaller, more responsive governments. I can understand why NOW and its fellow travelers would be terrified of that possibility. It has nothing to do with “keeping abortion legal,” for there is no chance Americans would ever vote to outlaw it completely, in every state. It has everything to do with siphoning power from the useful fantasy of a world that will never exist, and the ugly caricatures who tower above it with scourges and holy books.

A society reveals much of its character in the way it treats its women and children. Palin finds common cause with NOW in calling out “advertisers and networks for airing sexist and demeaning portrayals of women that lead to young women’s diminished self-esteem and acceptance of roles as mere sexed-up objects.” Abortion on demand has been very useful for preserving the self-esteem of men who desire casual sex without consequence. Perhaps those men would be less likely to view the women in their lives as problems, if they didn’t know there was an easy solution right around the corner.

The Tebows are not planning to use their Super Bowl minutes for a sermon, or to impose their views on anyone. They only want their chance to testify that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not an equation that balances out to zero. The idea that such a statement is unacceptably political is further evidence that our lives have become too politicized, because too many decisions have been bumped to an upstairs office that doesn’t even have a suggestion box.

NOW is mistaking a compelling narrative for compulsion. No organization that demands suppression of the other side’s free speech is “pro-choice” in any sense of the words. Feminists are certainly free to produce their own Super Bowl ad, trumpeting the virtues of partial-birth abortion, or any other practice they don’t think Pam and Tim Tebow support with suitable enthusiasm. Something tells me most people would choose to change the channel during that ad.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

Friday brought the annual March for Life to Washington, D.C. Held on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, it brings us the bittersweet comedy of watching the media studiously ignore a massive, peaceful protest in the nation’s capitol, even on a slow news day. Imagine the coverage that would be afforded a fashionable leftist cause that brought a couple hundred thousand people together for 37 years, often on a workday. If you could find that many people still deluded enough to protest on behalf of the climate-change fraud, the weekend news programs would discuss little else.

When the media does pay attention to the March for Life, it typically describes the event as a dreary vigil held by a graying herd of humorless, elderly scolds. Have a look at this photo gallery of the 2010 event and decide for yourself if this is an accurate description. Consider also this remarkable survey that shows six in ten young people believe abortion is morally wrong. Pro-lifers are not a dwindling band of tired footsoldiers decomposing at their posts. They’re also not the doctrinaire zealots dismissed by Democrat Party propaganda and popular culture. They were both wise and gracious in their support of Scott Brown during his run for the Massachusetts Senate seat, even though he doesn’t share all of their views. The pro-life movement understood that no face-saving deals with nervous House Democrats would prevent abortion funding from creeping into socialized medicine, sooner or later.

It’s tempting to look upon the pro-life struggle as deadlocked trench warfare against a culture that values self-actualization above duty to the family, especially a family that doesn’t exist yet. Strung above the trenches are the barbed wire of the abortion industry’s financial interests, and the rusted political power of the radical feminist movement. The latter is much diminished from its peak in the pre-Clinton years, but still has disproportionate influence over media coverage, as can be seen from Newsweek’s hit piece on the March for Life rally.

Perhaps it was inevitable that progress would come slowly for the pro-life movement, as every great moral struggle is waged on the battlefield of individual minds and hearts. I’ve always thought Roe vs. Wade was a terrible law, a poorly-reasoned attempt to end an important debate through raw judicial power. Americans could render this law irrelevant, without ever setting foot in a courtroom… by refusing to set foot in abortion clinics. Roe vs. Wade did not accurately express the moral sense of the nation, either in 1973 or today. No law can prevent us from asserting that moral sense through our free choices. I doubt America will ever make abortion completely illegal, particularly in terrible situations, such as pregnancies which threaten the life of the mother. We can understand that extending abortion to the horizons imposed by Roe didn’t make it any less terrible.

The odds against convincing an increasingly self-absorbed culture to make sacrifices on behalf of unplanned children are formidable. It’s interesting that our political class is comfortable demanding all sorts of other sacrifices from us, laid on the altar of our collective good under the guns of our huge, complex government. We are forever told that we must pay our “fair share” and accept the control of the State to achieve social justice… while absolute sexual liberty, including the inconsequential relationships promised through abortion on demand, are offered as a relief valve for the pressure of the State’s demands. We’re told to accept a sexual freedom that bypasses reason, in exchange for Constitutional freedoms which transcend the designs of government.

Those who gather in the March for Life each year are not daunted by the odds they face. Why should they be? Life exists in defiance of probability. Love is an act of faith, a leap from the lion’s head over a chasm of past disappointments and future peril. If your faith does not come from religion, you might find it in statistics. The universe is filled with poison and vacuum. Everything that lives had to win a million coin tosses in a row. Measured against the vast and frigid sweep of existence, the odds that you would be sitting here, reading this, are absurdly small… and yet, here you are. We owe our children the same fighting chance to be miraculous.

Our busy, distracted, abundant lives give us many reasons not to make the incredible sacrifices necessary to bring an unplanned baby into the world. Every year, on January 22^nd, thousands of voices fill the calculating air of Washington with one beautiful reason for young mothers-in-waiting to rise above their understandable loneliness and fear, and become incredible. Our bitter politics may never give us a chance to overturn Roe vs. Wade, but we can make it crumble to dust through faith in ourselves, and the future we can share with our children.

I have never wasted a single moment in anger at those who see their lives as a dark labyrinth that ends at the doors of an abortion clinic. I also won’t count a single moment spent in reverence of those who climbed over the walls of that maze as wasted. I don’t torment myself with the celestial question of exactly when life begins, because that’s not the point. The alternative to the awful extremity of abortion is the indispensable joy of introducing this flawed world to someone who might make it better.  The timetable of the procedure doesn’t change the nature of the alternatives.

The birth of every child is a victory against despair. Over ten thousand children were born in the United States yesterday. We are winning.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

With a Supreme Court vacancy, and a nomination battle under way, one of the most painful topics in American culture is once again in the spotlight: abortion. Looming at the intersection of individual liberty and the nation’s moral conscience, turning upon questions that mark the boundary between science and faith, heated in the crucible of a tyrannical exercise of raw judicial power made in the name of freedom, the abortion debate is a bleeding wound the American political system will never allow to heal. I’ve mentioned it in passing, during my brief time writing for the Green Room… but, like everyone else who makes a serious attempt to study and comment upon American life, I realized I needed to address it directly, and fully.

I’ve never been personally involved in the decision to abort a child. Most people haven’t, since there are roughly 1.2 million of the procedures performed each year, and over 300 million people live in the United States. Like many people of my generation, I also don’t have any children – there are only about 4 million live births in the United States each year. Compare 1.2 million abortions to 4 million live births annually, and you can see the dimensions of the abortion question. Compare either of those totals to the overall population, and you can see that quite a few of the people passionately assuming the pro-life or pro-choice stances don’t have any direct personal experience in the matter… a point I’ll return to in a moment.

My first experience with public debate was a speech class I took in college, during which I was assigned the pro-choice side of the abortion debate. I gave a very good speech, and was almost unanimously held to have crushed my debating opponent. I thought it was entirely a question of “a woman’s right to choose,” a decision in which no one but the woman had any legitimate influence. I was eighteen years old at the time.

Over the years, I came to realize that on the subject of abortion, half of America is eighteen years old.

It takes a certain maturity to understand that, in the vast majority of those 1.2 million annual abortions, the woman was not forced to conceive the child she’s choosing to eliminate. She had choices to make long before she headed for the abortion clinic. When the consequence of those choices became a viable human child, the issue became one of responsibility, more than choice. I understood that completely, on the day when I first held my infant niece. Maybe you have to hold a baby to understand it. Not enough of us get to hold babies, these days.

Recent polls show that a majority of Americans have come to consider themselves “pro-life,” but this is a matter of degree. You can add the poll numbers up a different way, and conclude that over sixty percent of Americans favor keeping abortion legal in some form or another. I don’t believe we would ever arrive at a national consensus that it should be eliminated completely. Speaking for myself, I always felt it should be available in the cases of rape, where the woman was made pregnant against her will; incest, where the woman was either forced to conceive, or is by definition mentally and emotionally incapable of being a mother, especially to a child all but guaranteed to have severe genetic defects; and the life of the mother. I would be awed and humbled to stand in the presence of a woman who insisted on carrying her child to term, even knowing it would probably cost her life, but I can’t agree that she should be compelled to do so. The conflicting opinions of the American people on the topic of abortion come, in part, from the difference between medically necessary, extreme cases, and the far greater number of abortions performed for the convenience of the mother – or the father. You can’t come up with a solid majority for outlawing abortion entirely, but a lot of people are growing uncomfortable with abortion on demand.

Much of the soft support for abortion comes from the essential immaturity of the electorate, who follow the path of least resistance when discussing an issue they’d rather not think about, and which probably doesn’t affect them personally. Abortion is part of a culture that works to prolong the adolescence of men and women until well into their forties. Having a baby is such a drag. It forces people to grow up and take responsibility for their actions. It compels carefree and hedonistic couples to confront the massive reality of their obligations to each other, and the life they have created. For many young mothers and would-be fathers, abortion is not a procedure designed to remove an unwanted fetus – it’s a procedure to restore a life of casual sex and self-indulgence, which went up in smoke when that home pregnancy test kit turned the wrong color. Young men who have never been involved in conception or abortion themselves find it easy to dismiss the entire issue by talking about “a woman’s right to choose,” which simultaneously allows them to sound enlightened, particularly in the campus environment many of them inhabit… and lets them off the hook for doing any serious thinking, or defending a morally serious but difficult position. When you force those young men to confront the question of whether elective abortions are wrong – rather than asking who should make the final decision about having one – the poll numbers shift. Saying you’re “pro-choice” is the quick and easy way for teenagers, of all ages, to sound fashionably liberal and dodge the more telling question, which is: what would you choose?

Of course, the abortion debate is horrendously deformed by Roe vs. Wade, an exercise of raw judicial power that short-circuited the national discussion, and left the pro-life side feeling marginalized and helpless. The absolute supremacy of “the right to privacy” inescapably reduces the value of life, for no one would argue that someone’s right to privacy allows them to murder a six-year old in the seclusion of their own home. Since no one would argue that privacy trumps life, the target of absolutely legalized abortion must not be alive. Further, Roe asserted that privacy trumps the potential of life, and since it does not exclusively address abortions directed at forced or life-threatening pregnancies, it ultimately asserts that convenience trumps the potential of life. The mother’s right to be free of the consequences of her actions takes absolutely priority over whatever the child would have done with his or her life. The consequences that flow from this judicial assertion, and the cultural influence of the immensely wealthy nationwide abortion industry it enabled, are profound and deep. Life, sex, and death are the only social forces more powerful than money. We are quick to denounce the unquenchable thirst for money as “greed,” but silent in the face of a reckless hunger for sex and death.

In the Sixties, it became fashionable for people to say it’s wrong to bring children into the terrible, spoiled world we inhabit. Those who oppose abortion on demand often say that each terminated pregnancy might have resulted in the next Michaelangelo, George Washington, or Jesus. The difference between those viewpoints is defined by faith in the possibility of excellence, and redemption, in each human life. One of the reasons I was eventually ready to identify myself as “pro-life” is that I think the world is better with more people in it. It’s not that any newborn child might be the savior of mankind… it’s that all of them are. If you think the world stinks, do something to make it better, and bring children into the world to help you. The good guys need reinforcements. The paralyzing fear of a dark future is a despicable, cowardly reason to deny the next generation their shot at making it brighter.

If we had the maturity, as a nation, to accept the burden of weighing freedom of choice against the right to life, we would strike down Roe vs. Wade and return the decision to the states. I have no doubt that many – perhaps even most – states would vote to keep abortion legal, many more would take action to restrict the availability of elective abortions, and a few would vote to outlaw the procedure completely. The people who passionately believe that abortion is murder would be free to move to states that have declared it illegal, where they would not be forced to watch as their tax money is used to support something they consider obscene. The people who desperately desire an abortion, and believe they have the right to make that choice, would face nothing worse than the inconvenience of traveling to a state where they can have the procedure. We are better off having a robust argument about abortion, than being mired in a bitter, vindictive squabble about whether we’re allowed to argue.

Once upon a time, when I was an eighteen-year-old student, I made a young lady cry because she thought her faith in the sanctity of life was no match for my debating skills. Now it’s twenty-five years later, and I can only hope that somehow, she reads this and realizes she won that debate, after all. Too many people who call themselves “pro-choice” view their objective as scoring victories against sanctimonious pro-lifers, and savoring their tears. The true losers in this debate did their weeping in private, after they realized something can be perfectly legal but horribly wrong… and sought to reverse a “mistake” that might have grown into someone beautiful, only to discover their second judgment was final, and would never grow into anyone at all.

In his commencement address to Notre Dame over the weekend, President Obama said, “I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.” The second sentence is an admirably clear statement of the abortion debate, which is driven by a disagreement over its basic terms. The first sentence is an outright lie – Barack Obama very much believes the debate on abortion should “go away,” because his political party is absolutely, fanatically devoted to the position that this debate was settled, forever, in 1973. The rest of Obama’s remarks on abortion, and much of the rest of his commencement address, was an embarrassing set of evasions that doesn’t square with Obama’s governing philosophy.

The pro-choice position holds that a pregnant woman has an absolute right to control her own body and abort an unwanted pregnancy. The pro-life side believes the life of the unborn child is a more important consideration than personal liberty. The majority of people who identify themselves as “pro-choice” do not believe the aborted fetus is a living human being with any legal rights. Some see abortion as essentially a surgical procedure to remove a clump of cells. This view is hard-coded into federal law through the Roe vs. Wade decision, which states that no legal restriction can be placed on aborting a fetus until it can potentially survive outside the mother’s womb. The majority of people who identify themselves as “pro-life” believe the unborn child is human long before it can pass this “survivability” test, so abortion involves the killing of a living human being. This is not a difference of opinion that can be resolved by “holding hands” and “building bridges.” I doubt it is a question medical science will ever resolve conclusively for us, since they’ll never develop a soul detector… and if they did, it would immediately be suppressed by politicians, to prevent it from being used on them.

When Obama gave his commencement address, he spoke as if he were addressing two equal sides of an ongoing debate awaiting resolution… but in reality, he is the head of a federal apparatus that regards the legality of abortion on demand as permanently settled, and the head of a party that regards dissension from pro-choice orthodoxy as heresy. The students at Notre Dame didn’t need to hear breezy platitudes about how they should learn to “open their hearts and minds to those who may not think precisely like they do,” a lesson Obama pompously declares himself qualified to teach. Instead, they needed to hear Barack Obama explain why he will not even consider appointing a Supreme Court justice who has the slightest criticism of the shoddy Roe vs. Wade decision. They needed to hear why the Democrat Party would never extend a pro-life speaker the courtesy Notre Dame extended to him.

It’s easy to ramble on about how everyone should be civil and learn to respect each others’ viewpoints, when your side of the debate is sitting on a Supreme Court decision that renders the opposing position illegal. Does anyone think Obama would have been singing the praises of open hearts and open minds if George Bush’s Supreme Court had struck down Roe vs. Wade, and forty states had immediately passed laws making abortion illegal, except in cases of forced pregnancy and medical necessity? Would he have secured the Democrat nomination if he’d spent 2008 lecturing the Democrat base about how “differences of culture and religion and conviction can co-exist with friendship, civility, hospitality, and especially love,” without federal law mandating that those will always be differences of opinion, rather than differences in policy? If abortion had been legally outlawed in some states, would the media allow a pro-life president to tell a student body how much he honors their consciences, without pointing out how an oppressive law has rendered their conscience irrelevant?

The last thing anyone in the Democrat Party wants to do is have a genuine debate, with serious consequences, against the pro-life movement. The best liberals can bring themselves to do is offer tepid acknowledgement that another side to the debate exists, which you can barely hear over the sound of the liberal congratulating himself for the openness of his mind. Pro-life demonstrators have already been classified as incipient terrorists by Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, and now they’ve been compared to night-riding vigilantes… by the leader of a Catholic school, no less. As with the opponents of same-sex marriage, those who strongly oppose abortion on demand are told their beliefs are permanently trumped by legal decisions and court interpretations, and they should content themselves with dropping a card into the national complaint box, where the government’s customer-service department will review it and get back to them later. Your opinion matters to us! Have a nice day!

Obama’s rhetorical smokescreen burns away when you remember who he is, and what positions he has supported as both senator and President. He encourages his audience to “work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions.” How? By giving official power and funding to the young women who have been going into those federally-supported abortion clinics with video cameras, and documenting their abuses? He asserted that “too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism; in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game. The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice.” Who’s more motivated by “immediate self-interest and crass materialism,” the pro-lifers, or the people who treat unwanted pregnancies as sudden attacks of an acute disease? Isn’t it socialists who regard the world as a zero-sum game, and assign themselves the duty of spreading the wealth around to the less fortunate, who can never earn a fair piece of the economic pie for themselves because the rich and powerful are hogging all the pie? Wasn’t it “immediate self-interest and crass materialism” that led Obama’s party to conclude it had a right to steal trillions of dollars from future generations to pay off its political allies today?

Considering the Left’s obsession with lunatic environmentalism, and the way they generally describe the results of unwanted pregnancies as little more than tax liabilities for a groaning welfare state, one might think their enthusiasm for abortion on demand comes from a conviction that keeping the population down is the only way to get that pie divided efficiently. Conservatives are the ones who believe the world is better with more people in it.

Obama urged pro-lifers in his audience to “join hands in a common effort” with their opponents. He should have made it clear that they would forever be the junior partners in this common effort, and he was prepared to spare no effort in keeping it that way. If he truly respects the passion and commitment of his opponents, he won’t mind putting his party’s rigid ideology to the test against them. It’s easy to salute the spirit of competition when you’re confident you’ll be the only legal contestant.