This week, Google featured imagery in the “Google Doodle” that conveyed overtly pro-life themes: a fully formed, distinctly human unborn child in utero, an image of 17th century midwife Justine Siegemund, and a mother sweetly smiling down at a newborn baby in her arms. Google explained, “Today’s Doodle celebrates Justine Siegemund, a midwife who dared to challenge patriarchal attitudes in the 17th century. She was the first person in Germany to write a book on obstetrics from a woman’s perspective.” The company’s statement went on to celebrate Siegemund’s groundbreaking advocacy for women through promoting safe birth practices.
According to the search engine, “Doodles are the fun, surprising, and sometimes spontaneous changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists. … The Doodle selection process aims to celebrate interesting events and anniversaries that reflect Google’s personality and love for innovation.” It is not unusual for the Google Doodle to celebrate a woman who advocated for women — or even a woman who advocated for birth; other doodles have previously celebrated pro-life feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul.
What is unusual, however, is for a publicly pro-abortion corporation to willingly promote imagery of unborn children in the womb, especially in the context of celebrating a woman who helped them be born. After all, Google has been an outspoken ally of the abortion industry, even going so far as to negatively flag pro-life pregnancy resource centers in search results and help employees travel or relocate for the sake of having abortions. Pro-abortion sources often avoid sharing messages that humanize unborn children, preferring to circulate misleading images like a notorious Guardian article that mischaracterized a gestational sac with the embryo removed as being a nine-week-old unborn baby.
So how on earth did a radically pro-abortion company find themselves sharing pro-life imagery that does humanize the unborn child?
If you look closely, messages that celebrate the lives of unborn children are actually all around us — yet they go unnoticed because they are separated from a directly political or ideological narrative. When a Super Bowl ad features an ultrasound of an unborn child known as “your little cousin Timmy” with his hand stuck in a tiny Pringles can, viewers of any political ideology can laugh. And when Rihanna announces her second child by performing visibly pregnant at the Super Bowl halftime show, Jimmy Fallon can say, “Imagine it’s the first day of kindergarten, and your fun fact is you’ve done the Super Bowl halftime show” without eliciting pro-abortion rage.
How can a company simultaneously celebrate abortion and remain unfazed by casual imagery valuing children in the womb? The answer is simple: we live in a culture where the value of unborn children is determined by whether or not their mothers want to birth them, rather than being rooted in their inherent humanity.
In a culture that affirms expressive individualism, where the core issue at stake in any moral question is the degree of happiness that different options will supply to an individual, the worth of an unborn child is entirely based upon his or her subjective “wantedness” and governed exclusively by the mother carrying him or her. When pro-abortion ideologues protest, “Her body, her choice,” they don’t only mean her “choice” to remain pregnant — they also provide her the choice to determine the value of her child’s life. Such selective valuing of human life is moral relativism at its worst.
Make no mistake: pro-lifers stand ready to accept any company with open arms that chooses to consistently recognize and celebrate the dignity and value of all unborn children. In the meantime, however, as many corporations continue to kowtow to the abortion industry, the pro-life movement should continue pointing out the hypocrisy of allowing circumstances and feelings to determine a question so crucial as whether an innocent human being lives or is killed.
