Doritos: A Pro-Life Fifth Column or Just a Clever Ad?

The Most Dangerous Snack Chip in America

I missed the Doritos "ultrasound" commercial when it first aired. I was either in the kitchen preparing the wings and pigs in a blanket or else was over in the church talking to the folks at the 7pm Mass about the Annual Catholic Appeal. Long story short, I was away from the telly for substantial periods, though I saw most of the "Big Game," certainly enough of it to be bored out of my gourd. It reminded me of those 1970's Super Bowls; not a blow out, but not really close either, plus very sloppily played. I can't think of another football game I've seen, much less a Super Bowl, where there was less than a touchdown separating the two teams with five minutes to go in the 4th quarter that was so devoid of tension or excitement.

Anyway, I digress.

Through the miracle of You Tube I saw the spot the next day. To be honest, I thought it was a little creepy, and was amused that some in the pro-choice crowd (NARAL in particular) were upset because they said that the commercial "humanized" the fetus. I thought it turned the fetus into a monster of sorts, but maybe that's my twisted point of view.

But enough about what I think, because obviously that isn't the majority view, and it isn't how abortion activists saw the commercial either. My reaction to their reaction is two fold.

1. Popular culture "humanizes" un-human things all the time. The fancy term for it is anthropomorphizing. Disney is the king of this: think Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bambi and Dumbo for starters. These are animals that are given human qualities, like the ability to talk, reason, and experience emotions the way people do. It's done with inanimate objects too, but I'm going to stick with examples from the animal kingdom. Disney isn't the only one to do this of course. We have the Warner Brothers cartoon universe that features Bugs Bunny (my personal favorite) and Daffy Duck. There are others I could mention like Tom and Jerry and Woody Woodpecker. You get the point, though. No one worries about humanizing a mouse or an elephant. But try "humanizing" something we all agree is at least genetically human, and everyone loses their minds, as the popular meme goes.

I've always had a suspicion that at least a few animal rights people formed their opinions because they were brought up seeing animals portrayed in cartoons and other entertainments with human qualities. When I was a kid the live action movie Benji, about a little cute mutt dog, was wildly popular. While our titular canine hero wasn't overtly anthropomorphized, the story was told from the dog's perspective, and the viewer was made to identify with the pooch's ups and downs the way you would as if he was a human character. Believe me, at the point in the movie when Benji gets kicked in the gut by the bad guys I cried, not just because I loved dogs (which I still do) but because the movie had successfully made an emotional, human connection between me and the dog.

When it comes to dogs and cats the devise is pretty harmless, and even in the case of more dangerous critters like lions and tigers and bears, the conceit is fine. Most people are able to separate the anthropomorphizing of animals for artistic or literary purposes from the reality that non domesticated animals are non domesticated for a reason. But sometimes I wonder. When I hear about some poor soul who gets gets killed or mauled by a wild animal at a game preserve because he or she trustingly and unadvisedly approached it, or has a pet chimp that shouldn't be kept as a pet turn on them, I ponder if they didn't watch the Lion King once too often as a kid. This sounds flip, but I don't mean it to be.

This is a very long way around to say that the argument that the Doritos commercial is dangerous because it humanizes a human fetus is absurd on the face of it. It's more likely that injuries and deaths have occurred from the anthropomorphizing of raccoons and tigers rather than from humanizing of what is human. No one is recommending, including me, that we should ban depictions of Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy or take Tony the Tiger off of Frosted Flakes boxes. Worrying that cutesy depictions of savage beasts, or even mildly aggressive carriers of rabies, could be harmful to the gullible is silly, and worrying that humanizing a fetus is somehow just as if not more dangerous is beyond ridiculous.

Which brings we to my second point:

2. If the pro-choice movement is scared that a junk food commercial is going to change public opinion on the humanity of the pre-born human, then they don't have much of an intellectual or moral leg to stand on.

You see, they know the power of both humanizing and de-humanizing language. They like the throw around terms like "blob of tissue" and "product of conception" because they know the majority of people will only accept abortion on demand as law if the pre-born child's humanity can be successfully denied or at least obscured. This is why there is fear of the widespread use of ultrasound technology among hard core pro-choicers. It's hard to deny the humanity of something that looks so human. This is why the Planned Parenthood baby parts scandal is so damning, because blobs of tissue don't have livers and hearts, or functioning brains and spinal cords that transmit pain signals. The more that these things are known the less likely the public will be to simply accept the ability to abort an unborn baby as an unlimited right.

There is still a long way to go to change minds and hearts. Abortion is big business masquerading as a human rights issue, and the vested interests are not going to let the cash flow dry up without a fight.  Then there are those, like Justice Ginsburg, who see abortion as part of a social engineering campaign, to keep "populations that we don't want too many of" from proliferating. In fairness there are those on the conservative side, like the late talkshow host Bob Grant, who favored legalized abortion because it would, theoretically, keep the poor from reproducing, thus easing the need for social welfare programs. And there are those who simply see it as an expedient way to solve an inconvenient problem. When someone is desperate or confused they will take short cuts around the truth, and if they're callous to boot, they won't even worry about what's true.

Advocating for abortion "rights" is in someway predicated on the dehumanization of the pre-born child. Anything that might shed light on the lie that what grows inside the mother's womb is simply a cluster of insentient cells must be extinguished, even if its a commercial for a snack chip.

The creator of the spot based it on his own experience of being at his wife's ultrasound session and thinking that a fetus craving Doritos would be a funny gag for a 30 second ad. If fact the baby in the commercial is taken from his child's ultrasound (with computerized manipulations, of course). I don't know what his views on abortion are, but obviously he didn't have to be convinced that the child growing in his wife's womb was human. Again, whether he and his wife make the connection between the fetus' obvious humanity and the ability to legal destroy it is anyone's guess. But militant pro-choicers do, and they shutter. I don't think that they're afraid that if people start to believe that fetus' are human that maybe they can be convinced that elephants fly and horses talk. Maybe they're afraid that the public at large will say that they have a right to be born.