Victor Penney:
Summer’s lease on my sports brain hath all too short a date. I shifted into September-mode at the end of July, back when NFL training camps were getting underway. What can I say? The call to fall is strong, but the truth is, I’m still thinking about the other football.
There were so many memorable moments from the World Cup, and I watched a good deal of them with my wife and kids. There was one highlight, though, I didn’t see, something that flew under my radar until well after the fact and I wonder if other pro-lifers missed it too.
A non-profit pro-life organization called Faces of Choice made headlines with their plan to run a special ad campaign on July 19 when Spain played Argentina in the championship final. The goal was simple: to shine a spotlight on the survivors of abortion.
To help grab attention, they brought in a heavy hitter for a 30-second commercial: boxing legend Manny Pacquiao. He was featured alongside a number of abortion survivors, and man, oh, man, the 12-time world champ didn’t pull any punches. The commercial opens with Pacquiao setting the tone with this knockout line: “Can you look at them … and say they shouldn’t exist?”
That’s the money hook right there, isn’t it? The concept is the same one the charity used back in 2020 for a Super Bowl ad that Faces of Choice says was rejected by the Fox network; a longer version of the video eventually premiered at the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
After Pacquiao’s appearance, the rest of the commercial runs through various close-ups of men and women who challenge viewers to think about the true value and dignity of human life. Here’s an excerpt: “Can you tell me that I didn’t deserve to survive? Because ‘choice’ isn’t an idea. ‘Choice’ is a person, with a name, a face, and a story. We are the survivors of choice. We are the faces of choice.”
Those faces, those voices, you were never supposed to know about any of them; they were all scheduled for “termination” – the womb was going to be their secret house of death. They’re alive now, praise be to God, and they have some harrowing tales to tell. Hope Hoffman, for example, was mentioned in an EWTN news report about the Faces of Choice campaign back in June. According to the article, the unborn “Hoffman survived a dilation and curettage abortion at ten and a half weeks’ gestation, or about three months of pregnancy.” Today, she bears a scar upon her forehead “where the abortion instrument cut into and crushed her skull.” This is the kind of truth about abortion that needed to be broadcast around the world, but there was a snag.
Even though FIFA organizers approved the new Faces of Choice commercial, air time proved to be expensive, which is no surprise when we’re talking about the single largest sporting spectacle in the world. You have to pay to play, right? Right.
Faces of Choice turned to crowdfunding online and managed to get some promotional support on social media from actors like Kevin Sorbo (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) and Dean Cain (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman). The organization was trying to raise $150,000 on their GiveSendGo page to show the world these survivors of abortion, but it appears they only brought in $10,115.
In the end, Faces of Choice didn’t secure any national deals to broadcast the ad, but reports say it was picked up for targeted streaming campaigns on a regional level. The non-profit also says it generated “a confirmed seven-figure audience across social media.” You can find the video now on the organization’s YouTube channel, so you can watch it and share their cause to a world starving for the truth. After all, the men and women in this commercial aren’t shadows of some dream that vanished after Spain defeated Lionel Messi for the World Cup. These are humans made in the image and likeness of God and the faces of an uncomfortable truth about abortion that the culture of death doesn’t want anyone to see.
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