Victor Penney:
Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life
Did a pro-life presidential candidate hit a home run when he paid to air graphic Abortion Victim Photography during the World Series? It depends whom you ask.
Before you start wondering who it was, the answer is not Donald Trump. It was Randall Terry of the Constitution Party. This is the same Randall Terry who founded Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion organization that rose to prominence in the ‘80s and ‘90s for blocking the entrances to abortuaries, so he’s no stranger to high-profile pro-life activism.
In November’s presidential election, his name was on the ballot in a dozen states, and his campaign made headlines for purchasing “controversial” life-and-family ads on national television, including the pregame show for Game 4 of the World Series on Fox.
Now, sports fans know that baseball is about moments and bursts of action, so there’s something to be said about the timing here. The commercial was only 15 seconds long, but it was a powerful 15 seconds.
Terry appears on camera, wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey. (I can forgive him for the shirt, even though I’m still upset with the team for inviting that group of blasphemous drag queens to their “Pride” night last year, but I digress.)
The opening of Terry’s advertisement was brilliant and blunt: “Sorry to interrupt the World Series, but killing babies by abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.”
Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry ran as the presidential nominee for the Constitution Party. Here he is featured in a commercial that included abortion victim photography which aired during baseball’s World Series.
In TV, the first words out of your mouth better hook the audience, because you’re always one second away from having a bored viewer change the channel and forget about you, but in this case, he nailed it.
The rest of his message grabs me, too: “Jesus said, what we do to children, we do to Him. A vote for these laws, or Kamala (Harris), is a vote to kill Jesus in the womb.”
Television is a visual medium, and to help drive home the seriousness of the issue, the spot featured graphic images of aborted preborn children.
As far as Fox goes, their hands were tied. The Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. has an “equal time” rule that requires the major networks to run advertising for all of the qualified political candidates, and it’s illegal for broadcasters to censor these commercials, so no one could block out or blur the pictures.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about the use of Abortion Victim Photography. On the one hand, I know it’s a powerful tool for waking people up to the reality of what happens when a child is killed in the womb. On the other hand, we’re talking about a national television broadcast where many young children were likely exposed to these images.
Some local stations ran a brief disclaimer before the ad, but concerned parents may not have had enough time to grab the remote, and I can picture myself in that exact situation, scrambling to change the channel and telling my kids to look the other way. Thankfully, we weren’t watching the broadcast.
I know many readers will say we can’t afford to “look the other way” when it comes to the evils of abortion, that it’s “the most important human rights issue of our age,” and I agree. At the same time, I believe there’s a time and place to use Abortion Victim Photography, and I don’t want that to be when I’m watching baseball with my children in the living room.
There’s another part of me that appreciates Terry’s commercial because, despite my concerns, the truth about abortion was revealed – uncensored – to a huge audience. How many people saw those horrific images and are having second thoughts now about abortion? How many people heard the message that killing a preborn baby is like killing Jesus in the womb?
Did Terry strike out here in terms of getting into the White House? Not in the least. On Oct. 21, The Washington Post quoted him as saying the main point of his entire campaign was to stop Kamala Harris from winning.
So, was the ad a game-changer? I don’t think it was. Would Harris still have lost if the commercial never ran? I’ll say that’s a safe bet.
In the end, Terry got what he wanted, which is good for him.
Personally … I’m glad that Harris lost and that my four-year-old son didn’t see the lifeless body of a preborn child that was torn to shreds.
