Adoption, the Poorly Marketed Option

A new Superbowl ad misses an opportunity

A woman is sitting on the toilet, staring at her pregnancy test stick, wishing not to see what she’s seeing. The camera lingers on the two red lines. Then, in a very clever bit of editing, it zooms rapidly down and cuts to an overhead shot of the woman caught in the space between, with a crowd on her left and a crowd on her right. One side screams “My body, my choice!” The other side, equally loud, screams “Choose life! Choose life!” Their faces are contorted, angry.

The woman turns back to see flickers of the life she’d imagined for herself as it were projected on a giant theater screen—graduation, marriage. First baby.

“They’re telling you that you’ve only got two choices,” the sympathetic female narrator says. “But the truth is, there’s three.”

I am a child whose existence was only made possible by adoption. I’ve written before about my mother’s stunningly providential origin story. Her birth mother, having decided that the father of her child was a father she did not want that child ever to meet, made the brave choice to place the baby into someone else’s loving arms. She did this even though she wasn’t especially conservative in her politics, and never would be.

I should have loved this Super Bowl ad. Or at least the idea of it, on paper. Alas, I hated it. To my surprise, various pro-lifers hyped it, including Lila Rose. It must be said that Lila has done more for unborn babies and their mothers than I ever will, so it pains me to disagree with her. But the spot is so terrible, so casually ugly in its depiction of the pro-lifers who have so earnestly loved these women for decades, that I’m forced to. And once again, I am moved to despair that for young women in crisis pregnancies, adoption remains the most poorly marketed option.