Tim Tebow, pro-life and what young women want

By Katie Walkercommunications director, American Life League

The excitement surrounding CBS' decision to run a pro-life ad featuring star college quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother during Sunday's Super Bowl is the latest in a series of signs that the pro-life movement is in and the abortion rights movement is on its way out.
As 2009 polls by Gallup, Pew Research Center, Rasmussen Reports and Fox News all have confirmed, a majority of Americans now consider themselves to be pro-life. The entertainment industry is paying attention, as evidenced by the 2009 pro-life episode of Law & Order, a chart-climbing pro-life country music song, and a popular pro-life American Idol contestant.
And now Tebow, the nation's most popular college football player, is joining the list of pro-life celebrity advocates. What's happening?
Pam Tebow might have the answer. On Feb. 7, tens of millions of Americans will hear a 30-second version of the love story of a mother risking her own life against doctors' recommendations so that her son might live. Pam's story speaks to love, courage, selflessness and the dignity of the human person. It is every mother's story, to a greater or lesser degree, and for young women like me, it's what true femininity is about.
By contrast, the feminist, pro-abortion movement has spent the past 50 years selling a philosophy that is simply unappealing to today's young women. Abortion rights leaders such as Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman just don't get it.

Feminist leaders would have us "Make the 'choice' that's right for you," but that sort of me-first mentality merely produced a generation of self-absorbed, Xanax-popping corporate climbers.
"You not only can, but should do everything men can do and more," we were told growing up. But the result is a generation of exhausted Super Women struggling to do it all and losing themselves in the process.
As Kissling and Michelman stated in their recent commentary in The Washington Post, "abortion is as tough and courageous a decision as is the decision to continue a pregnancy." Women my age have seen too many woman make that "courageous" abortion decision and suffer the emotional, physical and spiritual anguish.
So what do young women want? Human rights for all human beings for starters.
Today's young women are rejecting the selfishness of the feminist "me-first" paradigm and embracing the "other." We are embracing a rational, compassionate and selfless call for civil rights -- not just for me, not just for woman, but for every human being. Until all human beings -- including those in the womb -- are recognized as persons under law, any effort for true justice will be undermined. Young women want human personhood and they want it now.
The feminist philosophy young women have been force-fed by the media, by pop culture and by our education system for 50 years has failed in one critical way. It has not and could not dispel the searing images of the 20th century from our brains. It could not convince us that a me-first approach to life was somehow going to safeguard us from another Holocaust, from more racism, more lynchings, more genocide. It could not and will not be able to marry selfishness and love.
We've seen so much pain and suffering, and we yearn for justice. We've seen the pain, death and hatred bred by "make the choice that's right for you," and so we are drawn to the example of Pam Tebow, who 22 years ago in the Philippines chose selflessness, love and justice.
That's what we want.