All the fuss about Tim Tebow sent me to YouTube to watch the “pro-life” commercial he and his mother did for the 2010 Super Bowl.

Its content was kept secret until it was broadcast, and it surprised most viewers by being so low-key that if you hadn’t read all the speculation, you might have wondered what it was about.

Its message was that Tim’s mother was really glad to have him around because, she said, “I can remember so many times I almost lost him.”

They included, she told a newspaper years ago, a time when she was told that she should consider an abortion because her unborn baby had been badly damaged by medication she had taken during her pregnancy. She refused, and Tim was born without any abnormalities.

As we approach Monday’s 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision in which the Supreme Court authorized abortion on demand at any time in a pregnancy, a couple of other comments are worth noting.

First, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, said on Fox News that her uncle was pro-life in his basic message. She added, “Were he alive today, he would be working to secure peace and justice for those in the womb and healing for a nation that is still pained by over 53 million missing lives.”

Other members of King’s family, more reliably liberal than Alveda, disputed her view. But there’s no denying the fact that black babies are aborted at a far higher per capita rate than white babies.

As reported last week on www.lifenews.com, while African-Americans comprise 12.4 percent of the American population, “over 30 percent of the nation’s abortions are done on black women.” New York City has a 40 percent abortion rate overall, but “around 60 percent of New York City’s abortions are done on black women. In other words, 1,448 African-American babies are aborted for every 1,000 born.”

Want something even more appalling?

“Centers for Disease Control data show that since Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion has been the leading cause of death among African-Americans.”

Would King really have approved of that?

And then there’s this testimony, quoted from a recent biography of a widely known American:

“I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was OK and to thank her, because I’m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion. She was 23 and she went through a lot to have me.”

How much poorer this nation would have been had Apple founder Steve Jobs’ mother decided to exercise her “choice,” destroying in the womb the life that created all the devices that sprang from his fertile mind and enriched so many others.

Which leads to the logical question: How many other benefits — inventions, art, music, architecture, cures, moral insights and, most especially, loving sons and daughters — have we sacrificed in the past four decades?

Speaking of efficiently destroying lives, there is a record-holder right among us. The online news site www.cnsnews.com reported on Jan. 3 that Planned Parenthood, according to its most recent annual report, (covering mid-2009 to mid-2010) continued to hold its status as the nation’s largest abortion provider.

The organization served about 3 million clients during that period and provided 329,445 abortions, more than 30 percent of the abortions performed every year in the United States.

Although PP says that abortions make up only 3 percent of its “medical services,” those figures show 11 percent of its clients receive abortions. The group recommended only 841 babies to other agencies for adoption during that period, the report says.

Meanwhile, PP received $487.4 million in funding from “government grants and contracts.”

Because government money given PP, even if not directly used for abortion, frees up other funds, which means every U.S. taxpayer is helping support hundreds of thousands of baby deaths a year.

The report also said that PP claimed net assets of more than $1 billion in 2010.

Taken together, it’s clear that yesterday wouldn’t be too soon to cut this financially flush group loose from its grip on our wallets.

Finally, somewhere near 200,000 Americans will gather in Washington on Monday to join the 2012 March for Life.

If the experience of recent years (and the example of the 500 Mainers who gathered in Augusta last Saturday for Hands Around the Capitol) holds true, that march to the Supreme Court will contain a huge percentage of young Americans in their teens and 20s.

They are the survivors of nearly 40 years of legal abortion. They know they’re privileged just to be alive — and they’d like to see millions more live to join them in the years to come.

Which will happen, as they note, when human life is protected by law from conception until natural death.

M.D. Harmon is a retired journalist and a freelance writer. He can be contacted at: mdharmoncol@yahoo.com