By Simon Gonzalez
A lot of airtime and ink has been devoted to the various controversies arising from Super Bowl 50 — Carolina Panthers’ quarterback Cam Newton’s failure to contest for a fumble and his walkout from the post-game news conference, Beyoncé’s paean to the Black Panthers during the halftime show.
Virtually ignored has been the most egregious thing to emerge from Super Bowl Sunday: NARAL’s soulless attempt to rebuke an ad maker for what it apparently interpreted as a pro-life message cleverly disguised as an attempt to sell snack chips.
The uproar began immediately after the airing of a Doritos commercial. The ad features a mother getting an ultrasound of a “beautiful baby, due any day now,” according to the doctor. Meanwhile, the father looks on while munching Doritos, bag in hand. The baby on the ultrasound screen reaches for one, so the amused dad waves it around and makes the child move. In disgust, the mom grabs the chip and throws it away, prompting the baby to head for “the exit” to go after it.
Surely most watchers either laughed or groaned. But the humorless scolds at NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League) were not amused. The group immediately sent out a tweet: “#NotBuyingIt – that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses.”
That’s right. The funny ad — voted the third best 2016 Super Bowl commercial in a USA Today poll — was accused of covertly not just intended to get more bags of chips off grocery store shelves and into shopping carts. The same company that drew fire from some conservative groups for its gay pride flag-inspired rainbow chips last year is now on the hot seat for a nefarious attempt to undermine the mother’s right to choose by “humanizing the fetus.” That right-wing conspiracy must truly be vast indeed.
Ridiculous.
If you are going to be pro choice, at least have the intellectual honesty to state that your position is that the mother’s right to choose trumps her unborn child’s right to live. Because the inconvenient truth is that the baby in the womb is just that — a baby.
Sure, call it a fetus to be scientifically correct. But “fetus” is not a synonym for a clump of cells, or a piece of tissue. It’s a “human being or animal in the later stages of development before it is born.”
At the risk of humanizing a fetus even further, let’s review a little bit about these developing human beings that are knit together in their mother’s womb and fearfully and wonderfully made.
By the end of the third month, the baby’s arms, hands, fingers, feet, and toes are fully formed. It can open and close its fists and mouth. In the fourth month, the eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, and hair are formed. Teeth and bones become denser. Babies in the womb can even suck their thumb, yawn, stretch, and make faces.
Mom’s usually begin to feel the baby move in the fifth month, when muscles are developed and exercised. In month six, finger and toe prints are visible and the eyelids begin to part and the eyes open.
In the seventh month babies change position frequently and respond to stimuli, including sound, pain and light. They can see and hear by the eighth month, and in month nine can blink, close the eyes, turn the head, grasp firmly and respond to touch.
So why the fuss over humanizing an unborn human? Because it’s easier to justify killing a fetus than it is a baby.
NARAL is all in for abortion, until the last trimester, the last month, the last week, even the last second. Even with the ostensibly noble goals of “reproductive rights” and the health of the mother, surely the methods used — dismembering the child in the womb so it can be extracted (the typical procedure after the 20th week/five months), or even delivering it feet first until just the head remains inside the mother and then killing the child by puncturing its skull — must be at least a little unsettling, even for radical reactionaries who oppose any restrictions on abortion.
It’s a lot easier to be OK with such procedures if what is being killed is not a person. Dehumanization is a tried and true tactic, often used to justify abhorrent actions. It was used to perpetuate slavery, and to excuse the killing of 6 million Jews during the holocaust.
Even with its tactics and its tweets, NARAL is on the wrong side of popular opinion. A Marist poll commissioned by the Knights of Columbus, released last month, found that 81 percent of responders would restrict abortion to the first three months of pregnancy. In the most recent Gallup poll, while 50 percent identified as pro-choice, only 29 percent were in favor of abortion being legal under any circumstances.
NARAL’s ludicrous Super Bowl tweet isn’t likely to move those numbers in its favor.
