Bryan Kemper writes of his excitement on LifeNews.com at seeing pro-life T-shirts on 19 Kids and Counting.
Kemper, youth director of Priests for Life, says he got tweets from delighted friends and his wife even called him up to say their daughter was "freaking out" when she saw the Stand True T-shirt on an episode of the hit TLC reality show.
The T-shirt carries the slogan "I Survived Roe vs Wade, Roe vs Wade Will Not Survive Me". It refers to the US Supreme Court's landmark 1973 ruling that abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy was legal.
It's little wonder Kemper was stoked to see the T-shirts on the show. He gave Jessa Duggar one of the T-shirts when he met her at the Students for Life of America conference in January and offered to give T-shirts to the whole family. She followed up later with an email requesting a box of them to give to the rest of her clan.
However, Kemper's excitement last week was shortlived when he tuned in to the next episode of 19 Kids and Counting only to see the Duggar family wearing the exact same T-shirts but with the pro-life slogan blurred out.
"I was shocked," he admitted.
"Knowing how dedicated to the pro-life cause the Duggars are, I expected to see the shirts many times on their show," he wrote on LifeNews.com.
"It really amazes me that TLC would censor this; it's not like people don't know the Duggar's beliefs.Knowing that the shirt appeared in the previous episode without being blurred, I am wondering if they received complaints or negative feedback after it aired.
"I say we show TLC that there is so much more support for the Duggars wearing these shirts than there are complaints."
Jessa Duggar was recently on the receiving end of some strong criticism after she suggested the scale of abortion was akin to the Holocaust.
She made the comparison after visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC with her fiance Ben Seewald.
"The sanctity of human life varies not in sickness or health, poverty or wealth, elderly or pre-born, little or lots of melanin [making you darker or lighter skinned], or any other factor," she wrote on her Instagram.
"One human destroying the life of another deemed 'less than human'. Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are 'more evolved' and others 'less evolved'.
"A denying that our Creator - GOD - made us human from the beginning, all of ONE BLOOD and ONE RACE, descendants of Adam. The belief that some human beings are 'not fit to live'. So they're murdered. Slaughtered. Kids with Down syndrome or other disabilities. The sickly. The elderly.
"May we never sit idly by and allow such an atrocity to happen again. Not this generation. We must be a voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves. Because EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOUS. #ProLife."
See a clip from this week's episode of 19 Kids and Counting below:
