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In 1994, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders said in frustration that “We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children.” “Fetus” has become an obscurantist word intended to draw attention from the fact that a fully developed child in her mother’s birth canal is a “fetus,” structurally developed but not yet born, with scant legal protection. General Elders was saying that pro-life Americans are not sufficiently engaged in the well-being of children, but that falsehood is for another day.
Jump ahead about 10 years to one of my brother editors lamenting that fundamentalists were obsessed with sex, as in homosexuality, extramarital sex and abortion. We should be more concerned with (born) children and social issues he found more relevant, he figured. Eleven years later, Super Bowl 50, a couple of commercials show us how far we’ve come down General Elders’ path.
The first ad was a goofy commercial for corn chips. In it, a pregnant mother was having an ultrasound made, and Dad was eating chips. On the sonogram machine, we could see the baby moving toward the yummy snack as Dad waved it in his hand. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) went nuts because the ad “humanized the fetus” and was thus anti-choice.
#NotBuyingIt – that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses & sexist tropes of dads as clueless & moms as uptight. #SB50
— NARAL (@NARAL) February 7, 2016
The second ad was syrupy self-promotion for the NFL. The set-up was that there is supposedly a mini baby boom in the city of the winning Super Bowl team each year after the game. The video showed Super Bowl babies from the past 50 years singing while dressed in choir robes of their winning team’s colors. Cute? Nope, abortion fans again lamented that these amorous parents didn’t use contraception, thus avoiding parenthood.
More Super Bowl babies?!?! Get thee an IUD! #MediaWeLike
— NARAL ProChoice Ohio (@ProChoiceOH) February 7, 2016
Mission accomplished? Some of us at least are professionally over our love affair with the fetus, and even kids.
Or maybe we are over our love affair unless the unborn child is a profitable commodity. When David Daleiden was indicted in Houston for using a falsified ID during his recordings of real-life abortionists-for-hire negotiating a price for baby parts obtained during their already lucrative work, many in the abortion industry boasted that this meant the videos were falsified and that Planned Parenthood, the mothership of America’s antipathy for the fetus, was ruled to be on the side of angels. Not so, the recordings are still credible and the negotiations are still nauseating regardless of their legal status, and regardless of whether Daleiden is guilty of faking an ID. The many enablers of Planned Parenthood in the news media and entertainment industry and politics are definitely over their love affair with wholly formed but unborn children.
But we’re not. Neither are we obsessed with something inappropriate. Although I do believe there is something foundational about human sexuality, whether used for God’s glory or blasphemously, would our response be different if the issue was different? What if our society decided that punching old people was an acceptable choice, constitutionally allowable, morally desirable to make one wealthy and free? What if a tax-supported industry arose, whose minions made $500 for every senior citizen they hit? What if a culturally compromised branch of Christianity declared common cause and sympathy for senior sockers, declaring the issue “tragic but complicated,” tied to all kind of social justice and inequality issues? Would you preach against it? Would the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC work against it? Would that be an inappropriate “love affair with geriatrics”? It would not. Any sin, any destructive and dehumanizing behavior so lauded and even encouraged in our presence would be offensive to God’s people.
Of course a fully formed human child not yet born is humanized, but we didn’t do it and neither did the National Football League. God did it. Our love affair with that little person is a necessary outgrowth of our love for and fear of the God who humanized us all.
