According to U.S. News & World Report, “The advertisements for Super Bowl 50 ranged from heartwarming to absurd. NARAL Pro-Choice America live-tweeted about the Super Bowl ads they liked and disliked.”
When you scroll through the tweets, you quickly see that it doesn’t take much for the people at NARAL to dislike an ad. This includes Audi’s astronaut ad that committed the mortal sin of not having a female astronaut, Kevin Hart “robbing his daughter’s autonomy” by comically following her while she’s on a date, and Ryan Reynolds’ misogynistic reinforcement of the trope that women are bad drivers.
However, they saved their weirdest criticism for the Doritos ad. U.S. News & World Report says, “One of the most bizarre commercials came from Doritos: In it, a fetus propels itself out of its mother’s womb to get its hands on some of the nacho-flavored corn chips.”
The response from NARAL? “#NotBuyingIt – that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses”
The tweeters at NARAL remind me of the Wizard of Oz who, upon being seen for who he really was, shouted, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” In NARAL’s case it’s “Pay no attention to the baby on the ultrasound image!”
I am astounded by the audacity of a group that thinks it can dismiss the humanity of the unborn with an outraged tone and the claim that this unassailable fact is a mere “tactic.” Imagine if a Catholic group criticized a NARAL ad with the tweet, “ not buying the #antimale tactic of treating women like people.”
The idea that unborn children are not human is as absurd as the idea that the earth is flat. As I point out in my book Persuasive Pro-Life, fetus is a Latin word that means “little one.” According to most medical dictionaries, among humans, fetus refers to a human being from the eighth week of life until birth. An embryo is a human being from conception until the seventh week of life. The words embryo and fetus are like toddler or teenager—they are stages of development in the life of a human being. So a fetus by definition is human.
The pro-choice philosopher David Boonin writes in his book A Defense of Abortion, “[T]he most straightforward relation between you and me on the one hand and every human fetus on the other is this: All are living members of the same species, homo sapiens. A human fetus after all is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development” (20).
This kind of indignant denial will continue as scientific evidence and sound philosophical arguments continue to erode the pro-choice position. As the bankruptcy of their anti-child position becomes clear, groups like NARAL will end up resorting to this old lawyer’s tactic: “When you have the facts, pound the facts. When you don’t have the facts, pound the table.”