About that Doritos Ad

By Kit

A week and a half-ago was the Super Bowl. Which means, once again, the American people were forced to endure an onslaught of ads as we indulged in the ad makers’ pretense that these were the best they, or anyone, could create. While no doubt some were good there were quite a few that were dreadful, such as the unholy abomination from hell that was the Puppymonkeybaby. The American people deserve better after enduring such a horror.

But the most controversial ad of the night was the Doritos’ ad featuring a mother getting her first ultra-sound with her stereotypically schlub of a husband next to her munching on, what else, Doritos chips. Soon, the baby on the ultrasound starts grabbing for the chips and the husband, who finds this amusing, moves one back and forth over the (now annoyed) woman’s pregnant stomach with the baby moving within the stomach trying to reach for the chips. The mother eventually grabs one of the chips and tosses it away and the baby, using his legs, jumps out of the woman’s stomach, thus ending the ad to the cue of the mother’s the doctor’s, and the father’s mass of horrified screams.

It was a dumb ad.

But that is not what made it “controversial.” No, what made it controversial was that NARAL Pro-Choice (originally, “National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws”) sent out a tweet attacking the ad for using the “anti-choice tactic” of “humanizing fetuses”. Yep. They also attacked the “Ryanville” ad for being sexist because it depicted three women being distracted by the dreamy good looks of Ryan Reynolds.

Anyway, one has to find their objection to the Doritos ad rather interesting, “humanizing fetuses”.

At 17 weeks the baby, who has already grown teeth and can turn his or her head, begins to dream, at 25 weeks, a little more than halfway through the pregnancy, he is growing baby fat, and at 30 he can follow a light source.

And at 20 weeks, the point where you can determine your child’s sex, he can feel pain. Which means that people might be turned off by abortion when they hear those facts laid next to Anthony Kennedy’s description of the very technical-sounding Dilation and Evacuation Abortion: “the fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off."

And he feels it.

One can easily see why NARAL would rather we ignore this little fact. They would rather we pretend that abortion is “like going to the dentist” and that the unborn child is, instead of a human being, nothing more than a glob of cells. But ultrasounds have thoroughly disproved this point, even if the results are not as glaring as those in the commercial. We throw baby shows and chatter about what are unborn child can do at this week, at the same time calling it a "baby," while we "terminate" the "inconvenient" ones. How will can such a national cognitive dissonance continue?

Anyway, all this mess succeeded in doing was getting Doritos a bit more coverage for an ad that should probably have been forgotten as just another a dopey Super Bowl commercial. All because NARAL desperately wants to avoid the fact that they advocate the killing of human beings. NARAL probably would’ve been better off using Puppymonkeybaby as a jumping-off-point to push their evil views. Even I might’ve been persuaded a little by that one (only might and only a little).