Even by the ever-shifting rhetorical standards of pro-abortion liberals, this one is conspicuously tone deaf.
As soon as you saw that Doritos ad during last night's Super Bowl game, you knew it would lead to an unhinged response from abortion apologists. That it did, and then some.
The commercial showed a woman in the late stages of pregnancy undergoing an ultrasound while her blase husband stands beside her, casually eating Doritos.
The expectant mother, as expectant moms are wont to do, especially when their delivery date is days away instead of weeks or months, expresses anger that her husband -- sorry, her partner -- has chosen this of all moments to munch on a snack.
After seeing her fully-formed infant on the ultrasound monitor, joyous mom becomes irritated upon turning to father-to-be. "Really? You're eating Doritos?" (then turning to the technician). "He's eating Doritos on my ultrasound. Do you see what I have to deal with?" Technician (wearily, seen this before) - "I know."
Meanwhile, expectant dad discovers that his offspring shares his hankering for Doritos. Dad moves a Dorito chip back and forth, leading the baby to grasp toward the chip, as seen on the monitor. "Give me that!" snaps expectant mom, grabbing the chip from his hand and throwing it across the room -- whereupon baby forcibly ejects him/herself from the womb and all three adults scream.
Here's how NARAL reacted to the obviously light-hearted commercial, as Super Bowl ads so often are, via Twitter --
#NotBuyingIt - that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses & sexist tropes of dads as clueless & moms as uptight. #SB50
But how is it possible to "humanize" those who are already inherently human? Clearly this hadn't occurred to the clueless sort who tweeted NARAL's response.
Among the "antichoice" tactics in the ad -- its first spoken words, from the ultrasound technician -- "And there's your beautiful baby ... any day now."
Such stating of the obvious is clearly unacceptable to NARAL Pro-Choice America, whose members staunchly resist admitting that unborn babies are exactly that. I'm reminded of a social media exchange with a liberal relative of mine a few years ago ago after he posted that "a fetus is not a baby." My question to him -- "Then why does the expectant mother say she just felt her baby kick?" His response - to quote a pro-abortion nun's cliched belief that abortion opponents care nothing about babies after they are born. I asked the same question again -- followed by him deleting the entire thread. Not a trick question, really.
In a soul-searching essay written by uber-feminist Naomi Wolf for The New Republic in 1995, titled "Our Bodies, Our Souls: Rethinking pro-choice rhetoric," Wolf acknowledged that those in favor of legalized abortion had lost the moral high ground to abortion opponents --
... To its own ethical and political detriment, the pro-choice movement has relinquished the moral frame around the issue of abortion. It has ceded the language of right and wrong to abortion foes. The movements abandonment of what Americans have always, and rightly, demanded of their movements -- an ethical core -- and its reliance instead on a political rhetoric in which the fetus means nothing are proving fatal. ...
Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life.
Even if the Doritos ad were somehow shorn of its "sexist tropes" -- of expectant moms as prone to irritation (!) and "clueless" dads consigned to bystander status by the biological reality of only women bearing children -- the commercial would remain unacceptable to NARAL for the unpardonable offense of publicly displaying an ultrasound.
Just as images and footage of 9/11 must be kept to a minimum, even during the anniversary itself of the worst day in American history, lest they remind anyone that radical Islam remains a lethal threat, so too must ultrasounds be rarely seen outside of a doctor's office given their troubling capacity to make those viewing them reconsider their view of unborn babies as easily expendable blobs of uterine tissue.
What has arguably done more to shift the abortion debate in favor of life have been advances in technology that allow expectant mothers and fathers to witness the miracle and beauty of their unborn child through increasingly more vivid ultrasounds. Once a person has experienced this transformative moment, and to a lesser extent for those who witness it second-hand from video footage, it becomes difficult to deny that the unborn child is alive, human and deserving of legal protection.
Those who support abortion on demand have long complained about pro-lifers publicly exhibiting the gruesome results of abortion, deeming such willingness as ghoulish, macabre and, worst of all, gauche. What NARAL's kneejerk reaction to the Doritos ad demonstrates is that abortion apologists cannot tolerate any depictions of unborn life -- post-abortion or pre-delivery -- because all possess the unfortunate effect of "humanizing" the human.
