William Saletan and the Tebow ad: Abortion is not a heroic effort to save anyone’s life

By Matt Bowman, Esq.
Alliance Defense Fund Legal Counsel

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Critics of the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad have illustrated their bias against life. You have to have a pro-abortion chip on your shoulder to respond with criticism to a loving and heroic story of a mother who risks her life to give birth to her son.

Slate.com’s Bill Saletan asserts a more sophisticated, but still misguided, argument against the ad. Saletan ultimately errs because he doesn’t understand that a mother’s and child’s lives are interconnected, so that being pro-life for the mother never means choosing to kill the child.

Saletan troublingly argues that Tim Tebow’s mom Pam, by highlighting her decision not to abort Tim during a pregnancy that risked her own health, may convince mothers to be similarly loving and heroic, which in Saletan’s view may irresponsibly threaten the lives of women in high-risk pregnancies. Saletan further suggests what any mother would shudder at if she really thought about it: that perhaps mothers should kill one of their children so they are alive to be mothers to their other children (but, what kind of mothers would that make them?). Saletan even perplexingly suggests that abortion is better for children because it lowers preterm birth health risks to the child.

Most recently, Saletan continued his criticism by arguing that various cases of women who chose not to abort their children actually demonstrate the value of “choice” over life, since the women, in Saletan’s view, sacrificed their children for themselves, at least to some degree.

Saletan points to several cases on the websites of Focus on the Family, which sponsored the Tebow ad. Those stories describe women who found out about risks to their health early in their pregnancies, but opted against abortion and instead waited, in several cases, until 32 weeks pregnancy to deliver their children, but several children nevertheless died after the births.

Saletan contends that these women, though they claim to be pro-life, were actually pro-choice too, because they “compromised” the lives of their children by giving birth to them too many weeks before full-term birth. Saletan thus contends that these heroic women who risked their lives to give their children a good chance to survive at 32 weeks gestation, still treated their children as less valuable than themselves since they didn’t wait longer.

Saletan’s argument errs in two main ways. First, although Saletan concedes that early delivery “isn’t abortion,” he does not seem to internalize the point. Abortion, as a public policy and health issue, refers not merely to delivering a child (all births deliver a child, but they aren’t abortion). Abortion means an act that directly kills the child. Abortion methods in the second and third trimester of pregnancy almost always involve ripping the arms and legs off the child, or the partial-birth abortion method. And “abortions” never involve trying to save the child after it is delivered, much less having a desire to do so.

Therefore, when women facing a health risk reject abortion and instead risk their health to wait until later in gestation when their babies could have a chance at surviving, it’s not accurate to say those women simply killed their children later. The killing in abortion is nothing like what these loving women did to try to save their children’s lives and their own. Safe and living children are the last things that abortionists want.

Saletan’s second error is that he miscalculates just how much these women acted to save their babies. Saletan contends by stopping at 32 weeks gestation instead waiting longer, these women, in his view, still chose an action that saved their own lives but gave their children less than a full chance. Thus Saletan suggests that when the women followed medical advice to deliver at 32 weeks, these women were treating their “fetuses” (as he insists on calling them) as less valuable than themselves, by choosing their own lives in exchange for their babies’ mere chance at life.

But Saletan oversimplifies the pre-existing risks to mother and child. When a woman’s pregnancy risks her life, it doesn’t just risk her life–it risks her child’s life too, since if she dies the child dies too. So the women didn’t move their babies from a 100% chance at life in the womb to a 50% chance due to preterm delivery. The children’s likelihood of survival was already low and the women’s own lives were at risk by the underlying condition in that pregnancy. By delivering the babies, their mothers may have been increasing their chances of survival, not decreasing those chances. The March of Dimes reports that babies at 28 weeks gestation have a 96% survival rate, and at 32 weeks gestation 98% survive.

Consequently, Saletan is simply wrong to say that these mothers were “compromising” the value of their babies by delivering their children early. On the contrary, the women took a situation in which, early in pregnancy, they themselves had a 100% chance of survival and their children had 0% if delivered, to a later stage of gestation during which the women’s chance of survival went down and the children’s chance went way up, above the babies’ chance of surviving if the women had continued the pregnancy to say 37 weeks. Delivering the children at 32 weeks may have been the best chance at survival for the child as well as the mother, because the children would probably die too if the mothers died. The doctors’ advice therefore was not necessarily a choice of mother over child, but an attempt to save both.
These heroic women were dealt a threatening situation, and in response they didn’t do what the medical establishment and Bill Saletan recommend by committing an act of killing through abortion. Instead the women maximized the attempt to save both mother and child. Their early-delivery decision was not a “compromise” of their babies’ lives–it was an attempt to save both, and in many cases, it was a decision to give their children a better chance at life than themselves.

Saletan opposes laws against abortion, so he wants to argue that pro-life policy would either require mothers to die, or would hypocritically allow mothers to kill in some cases (demonstrating that the preborn are really subhuman “fetuses” after all). But preborn children can be protected as persons in law again, and abortionists prosecuted, without in any way making it illegal to try to save both mother and child.

Though Saletan’s criticism is less shrill than NARAL’s, he makes the same basic attempt to draw the square peg of “pro-choice” beliefs through the round hole of pro-life mothers who highlight the personhood of their preborn children. What Saletan essentially misses is that the lives of mothers and preborn children are intertwined. When the mother is at risk, the child is at risk too. When the mother tries to save both lives if possible, she doesn’t “choose” herself over her child. On the contrary, such women almost always put their children first. And that’s what being a mother is all about.