Center for Reproductive Rights Urges CBS to Its Reconsider Super Bowl Ad

The Huffington Post: Center for Reproductive Rights' Letter to CBS: Tebow Story Raises Serious Accuracy Questions, by Nancy Northup:

  We are writing to request that CBS reconsider its decision to air an advertisement by the anti-choice group Focus on the Family, featuring Pam and Timothy Tebow during Super Bowl XLIV.

. . .  We believe it is essential that you determine whether the proposed Tebow advertisement meets CBS's own standards with regard to accuracy and advocacy . . .

Past media coverage of the Tebows suggests that the ad may present a misleading picture of the reality of abortion in the Philippines. In 2007, the Gainsville Sun reported that Pam Tebow was living and working as a missionary in the Philippines in 1987 when she was pregnant with her son Tim. According to the Sun story, doctors encouraged Mrs. Tebow to terminate her pregnancy because she had suffered a medical condition that endangered her health and the pregnancy.

Abortion was criminalized in the Philippines in 1870. It has been illegal ever since. Filipino law does not contain a single exception to its abortion ban - not even to save the life of the pregnant woman or to protect her health. Indeed, in 1987 - the year in question in the advertisement - the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines succeeded in making the Philippines constitution the first ever to recognize a government obligation to protect "the life of the unborn from conception."

. . . Given this context, it raises questions about whether physicians in the Philippines would have urged a married pregnant woman to illegally terminate her pregnancy in 1987. Attached is a brief factsheet further detailing the situation in the Philippines and the abuses women suffer as a result of its draconian anti-abortion laws and stigmatizing legal and political climate. . . .