On July 19, during the final game of the FIFA World Cup , something happened that most of the world was not expecting between the whistles. As Spain and Argentina met on the pitch and billions of eyes turned toward the screen, a different kind of message reached some of them — one carried by a boxing legend and by the faces of people the world has been told didn’t exist.
The Faces of Choice commercial, featuring boxing Manny Pacquiao alongside abortion survivors from around the globe, opened with a question I have asked, in one form or another, for most of my adult life: Can you look into our eyes and tell us we shouldn’t exist?
Can you tell us we didn’t deserve to survive?
Background
Six years after Faces of Choice’s Super Bowl ad was blocked days before airing, that same question — and many of those same faces — reached one of the largest audiences in human history.
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I am one of those faces. So are survivors from the United States, Hungary, Uganda, the Philippines, and beyond. And that is exactly the point I made a few weeks ago at the National Right to Life Conference when I stood in front of that room and tried to answer the question I get asked more than any other: how often does this happen?
The honest answer? More often than even the pro-life movement knew about, and in more places than most people imagine.
As such, abortion survivors are not some statistical footnote. We are a global reality — born in every decade, on every continent, into every kind of family, by every type of abortion procedure at every gestation.
What changes is not whether we exist but whether the world is willing to see us.
And whether the media and social media will give them the opportunity to.
That is why a thirty-second ad during a World Cup final matters. Not because a commercial ends abortion — no commercial does that — but because for a few seconds, in living rooms in the Philippines, “choice” stopped being an abstraction.
It had a name.
It had a face.
It had a story.
Lyric Gillett, the founder and executive director of Faces of Choice, has said from the beginning that her hope is simple: that after the final whistle, the word “choice” would carry a different association. Every media opportunity like this helps to reach that goal.
This is also the part of my recent presentation at the June National Right to Life Conference that I want to underscore again. Collaboration is where impact happens. Faces of Choice built the ad. FIFA approved it. Donors funded the placement. Survivors trusted the process with our stories.
The Abortion Survivors Network has spent years making sure survivors are prepared, supported, and equipped to step into moments exactly like this one. When the movement functions the way it was meant to — each part carrying out their mission, in step with the others — the world sees what it deserves to see.
The message is unmistakable: Choice is not an abstract concept surrounding abortion, it is a person. And the survivors they saw in the ad are still here, still speaking, still living proof that every human being is more than a choice.
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LifeNews Note: Melissa Ohden, who survived a saline abortion in 1977, is founder and CEO of the Abortion Survivors Network and author of “You Carried Me: A Daughter’s Memoir.” This appeared in The Hill and is reposted with the author’s permission.
The post I Survived an Abortion. And I’m Not Alone appeared first on LifeNews.com.