This Year’s Super Bowl: A Pro-Life Tipping Point?

It is rare for the wise and powerful to admit that they are ignorant. But that is what the majority of Supreme Court justices did in Roe v. Wade, claiming that science offered no answer to the fundamental question of when human life began. Citing debates among biologists and physicians, the justices said that there had never been a consensus about the moral and legal status of unborn children. So the justices stepped in to fill this alleged gap with an invention of its own: a “right of privacy” spun from subtle inferences they found between the lines of the actual words in the Constitution.

From that legal fiction, they and subsequent majorities wove the seamless shroud of abortion on demand, in 50 states for nine months of pregnancy, and in practice, for any reason at all — among the laxest, most ethically vacuous abortion laws in the world, outside of Communist China.

But the veil of ignorance has been lifted. Forty years of advancing medical technology have answered the factual question, if it ever really existed: A human being is genetically distinct and explosively alive from the moment of conception. Its DNA is human, and it reproduces independently of its mother, upon whom it relies only for nutrients and protection. It meets every test that scientists regularly use for determining whether something is a) alive and b) human.

We can watch tiny unborn children move around and adjust themselves in the womb to get more comfortable. We know that they feel pain. Doctors can take them on as patients and perform subtle surgeries inside the womb. We have witnessed on ultrasounds something our ancestors never could have: unborn twins engaged in horseplay. And now thanks to Doritos, we have seen that unborn boys crave some of their dads’ tortilla chips.

I can’t tell you how delighted I was to see, in the middle of the Super Bowl, a snack-chip company buy one of the most expensive ad slots available on television to show us a goofy, glorious spectacle like this one:

Of course, abortion lobbyists reacted with outrage:

The misanthropes at NARAL were outraged for a reason. Doritos was calling them on the lie that butters their bread. How dare a maker of tortilla chips engage in “humanizing” human fetuses, which we all know are really… what, exactly? Clumps of cells? Parasites? Tadpoles?

Too many couples have taken those grainy ultrasounds and pasted them on their fridges and Facebook profiles for such crude lies to last much longer. But this year’s Super Bowl was the gift that kept on giving, because the NFL itself offered us another commercial with a clear pro-life message. This one wasn’t funny, but genuinely uplifting:

The message of this ad was straightforward and delightful: loving couples who watch their teams win the Superbowl take to bed and celebrate, and the result is … human life. These human lives, who are singing now in front of us on the television. And the invitation is clear, in the ad that ends with the slogan “Football Is Family”: Go ye therefore and do likewise.

Of course not everyone was inspired. Here’s a sampling of the blowback from people who don’t necessarily like being reminded where babies come from:

What these ads and other recent events tell me is that we’re winning. In fact, if we keep pushing forward, we are about to win. In the most recent Republican debate, every single candidate on stage was someone who takes a pro-life stance—from the insurgent voice of the GOP base, Ted Cruz, to the angry populist Donald Trump. In fact, the candidate whom the party establishment regards as most electable, Marco Rubio. took a brave and principled stand favoring protection for every unborn child, even those fathered in the appalling crime of rape — insisting that he would rather lose an election than be wrong about human life.

Keep in mind this is the same party which before Ronald Reagan was loudly neutral about abortion — an issue which party mandarins claimed put Reagan outside the American mainstream.

Where’s your mainstream flowing now? Popular music stars like Justin Bieber are outspokenly pro-life. On the hit show The Blacklist, the hard-bitten female FBI agent is agonizing over a pregnancy — over whether to raise the child or put it up for adoption. Pop films depicting the abortion issue honestly keep getting made and making money, from Bella to Knocked Up to Juno. People are plainly tired of pretending not to know the plainest facts of human life: We are woven inside our mothers, and alive from the beginning. Whether or not we were conceived after the Super Bowl, or craved our dad’s Doritos, we were us, real human beings, not protoplasm or euphemisms (such as the “products of conception”).

Even the tragic facts of the Planned Parenthood videos are leaking through the media’s shoddy filters: Before Congress and on TV, defenders of that organization are being forced to insist that their traffic in eyes and lungs and livers was technically legal. Just think how many Americans are hearing about that on the news and thinking: “Eyes, lungs, and livers? I thought they were blobs of tissue….” Those facts, which the Supreme Court didn’t want to hear and NARAL doesn’t want you to learn, will take on a life of their own. They’ll divide, and reproduce, and sooner than we expect they will emerge with an ear-splitting cry.

It’s the cry of life, for life, and no one will be able to silence it. (For more from the author of “This Year’s Super Bowl: A Pro-Life Tipping Point?” please click HERE)

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