Abortion Survivor Slams Fox for Rejecting Pro-Life Super Bowl Commercial

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Feb 4, 2020   |   12:08PM   |   Washington, DC

Josiah Presley is one of more than a dozen abortion survivors who had hoped to share their stories through a 2020 Super Bowl ad.

Though FOX Sports eventually rejected the ad from Faces of Choice, Presley told Baptist Press that he remains hopeful.

“Our prayer is that it still has an impact and it still shows people the truth of what abortion is,” he said.

Presley, a youth pastor at Galloway Avenue Baptist Church in Mesquite, Texas, said he was disappointed but not surprised that FOX Sports rejected the ad.

The simple, yet profound commercial makes people think about the injustice of abortion without mentioning the word. Through the faces and words of abortion survivors, it exposes the undeniable, ugly truth that an abortion kills a unique human life.

“Can you look me in the eye and tell me that I shouldn’t be alive?” Presley asks in the ad.

Before he was born, Presley said his mother tried to abort him. Born in South Korea, he survived a curettage abortion, “the type of abortion where a doctor goes into a mother’s womb and rips the baby apart and brings him out in pieces,” he told the Texan.

After he was born, Presley was placed in a foster home and later adopted by an Oklahoma family, according to the report.

As a teenager, he said he struggled with anger and hatred toward his birth parents, abortion providers and people who call themselves pro-choice on abortion. He also wrestled with low self-esteem because of a deformity believed to be a result of the abortion, the report states.

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Then, in high school, he said he experienced a change of heart during a church conference and accepted Christ as his savior. Presley said he realized that he was forgiven, and he also needed to forgive his birth parents.

He mourned the modern “culture of death” that destroys unborn babies and harms mothers and fathers.

“We live in a culture that tells women, ‘If you want to get ahead in life, if you want to go anywhere in life, you have to take a life,’” Presley said. “We live in a culture that tells men, ‘Fulfill the passions of your flesh, and you are not held responsible for your actions.’ We live in a world that applauds evil as seen by its support of the taking of the most innocent of human beings’ lives.”

He said Jesus Christ is the only thing that can overcome this evil, and he challenged Christians to get more involved in pro-life ministries.

“If there aren’t those ministries in your church, maybe God would call you to start those,” he said. “Love your neighbor in a tangible way so that as we speak for truth, as we affirm the value of human life, the world knows it by the way we value the lives of the born.”

Their survivals have been called “imaginary” and protections for them unnecessary, but hundreds of abortion survivors do exist. U.S. government health data indicates that at least 40 babies were born alive in abortions in just three states between 2016 and 2018. Researchers estimate that hundreds, potentially thousands, of babies have survived abortions over the past several decades.

Ultimately, Faces of Choice leaders hope their stories will break down the myth of “choice.”

The abortion survivors featured in the ad are: Dr. Imre Téglásy (1952, Hungary); Paula Page (02/24/54); Miriam “Penny” Hopper (11/29/55); Denisha Workizer (7/11/76); Melissa Ohden (8/29/77); Jennifer Millbourn (9/02/78); Jennifer Callender (7/18/80); Claire Culwell (3/06/88); Hope Hoffman (8/12/91); Josiah Presley (10/07/95); Asiimwe Ronald Williams (9/25/97, Uganda); Dona Marie Mendoza (Philippines); Jaylyn Schoch (8/15/03); and Zechariah Hagan (10/20/13), one of the first abortion pill reversal survivors.