January 30, 2010

Pretty interesting, don't you think? An entire media mythology has grown up around the noble missionary who carried her child to term against a doctor's advice, and the child grows up to become a devout Christian and football star.

Or maybe not:

As Joe Jervis points out, we’ve been hearing the propaganda for weeks now about how Tim Tebow’s mother was confronted with a difficult pregnancy, encouraged to have an abortion, and made the heroic and courageous choice to carry the pregnancy to term, so that her son Tim would one day sport Bible verses in his eyeblack and have a really hard time at NFL tryouts. As you all know, the propaganda has become even fiercer as Focus on the Family has spent $2.5 million on an anti-choice ad to be aired during the Super Bowl featuring Tebow’s story.

Yeah, well, Gloria Allred begs to differ:

In her exclusive interview with RadarOnline.com, Allred slams the ad and CBS’s decision to air it, pointing out factual inconsistencies with Pam’s story. One glaring one is the fact that the act of abortion is totally illegal in the majority Catholic country of the Philippines – under all circumstances including rape and incest, and even without a provision in the circumstance that the mother’s life is in danger. The law has been in effect since 1930.

Allred says she believes it an impossible scenario to believe that [Filipino] doctors would [have] ever suggested abortion as a viable option for Tebow in the first place. And when you learn that physicians and midwives who perform abortions in the Philippines face six years in prison, and may have their licenses suspended or revoked, and that women who receive abortions – no matter the reason – may be punished with imprisonment for two to six years, it’s easy to see why.

Gloria Allred is threatening to sue CBS if they run the Tebow ad, saying if the ad fails to disclose that abortions were illegal at the time Tebow made her “choice”, "I intend to file a formal complaint of misleading advertising with those federal commissions.”

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