It is Nacho Place to Comment: The Superbowl Commercial that got America talking

This year, because my beloved Giants weren’t in the Superbowl, I found myself not very interested in the “big game.” I found myself doing work when the actual game was on and only watching the television when the commercials aired. While I was waiting for Budweiser’s annual commercial with a puppy and/or a horse to come on, a commercial for Doritos caught my, and America’s, eyes.

In this commercial, a female doctor is looking at an ultrasound and tells the mother, “And there’s your beautiful baby!” While the mother is gleaming with joy, the father is right beside her, eating Doritos. The woman makes an irritated comment about how her husband is eating Doritos while she is getting an ultrasound. The father then realizes that when he moves with the Dorito, so does the baby. The mother gets annoyed and throws the Dorito across the room, which causes her to go into labor.

While I thought that this commercial was funny and entertaining, others most definitely did not agree. NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) an abortion activist group, tweeted that night, “#NotBuyingIt- that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses & sexist tropes of dads as clueless and moms as uptight #SB50”  

I think that NARAL’s version of the commercial would go something like this-A female doctor is looking at an ultrasound and tells the mother “And there’s your beautiful clump of cells!” While the mother is gleaming with joy, the father of said clump of cells is beside her eating Doritos. The mother comments about how her husband is eating Doritos while she is getting an ultrasound to see how round the ball of cells looks like in her womb. The father then realizes that when he moves the Dorito, so does this mysterious unit of cells. The mother throws the Dorito across the room and the clump of cells decides to leave the mother’s womb and at that exact moment change into a human being. How nice. If only that were how it worked.

NARAL claims that Doritos used an “antichoice tactic of humanizing a fetus”. I’m sorry; I didn’t know it was so wrong to humanize a human. News flash: the mother is not giving birth to a dog or a cat but to an actual human being. In fact, the ultrasound image that was used in the commercial was based on the actual ultrasound of the creator of the commercial’s son, Freddy who is now 9 months old. Therefore this “humanized fetus” only looks like a human because wait, he actually is one! Crazy, right?! It’s no wonder that after seeing an ultrasound of their “clump of cells”, 78% of woman who were previously contemplating an abortion decide not to get one. Is it because they get attached to the clump of cells and think it’s so cute? Hardly. When most women see an ultrasound of their child, they can see the humanity of their baby and realize that an abortion would actually kill their child, not just “scrape out this ball of cells”.

In the commercial the doctor mentions how the mother will go into labor any day now, meaning she is in her third trimester. Babies in the third trimester can already perform so many actions such as sucking their thumb, stretching, moving their head, and responding to external stimuli like music. They can roll their eyes, taste, smell, and kick, and even have hair! I don’t know about you but that sounds like a really skilled “clump of cells”! I mean I didn’t even know a clump of cells had a head to move or a thumb to suck.

So NARAL, I’m #NotBuyingIt. This “fetus” is a living human being. I’m sorry it scares you to think that this “clump of cells” could actually be a human being, but that is the harsh reality. When the sperm meets the egg in fertilization a unique DNA code is formed and a new human being comes into existence-not a dog, or a cat, or a ball of cells, but a human being who has the right to life. This “fetus” is a human who deserves to be humanized in front of the over 110 million people who tuned into the big game.