An abortion-rights group’s protest that a Super Bowl ad wrongly engaged in “humanizing fetuses” has drawn protest from several Southern Baptist leaders.
During the Feb. 7 Super Bowl, Doritos aired a commercial depicting a husband and wife viewing an ultrasound image of their unborn child. In the ad, the child begins motioning for the Doritos her father is consuming.
In response, NARAL Pro-Choice America tweeted, “#NotBuyingIt – that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses & sexist tropes of dads as clueless & moms as uptight.”
Doritos ad YouTube screen capture |
The tweet was one in a series of NARAL Super Bowl tweets aimed at supposedly “sexist” advertisers, according to the group’s Twitter feed.
Southern Baptist pastors, entity heads and seminary professors were among the critics of NARAL’s Doritos tweet.
Adam Dooley, pastor of Sunnyvale First Baptist Church in the Dallas area, tweeted, “Whatever you do don’t humanize humans. It is bad for business after all. If your business is killing baby humans.”
Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, wrote in an online commentary, “The fact that the parents in this ad … could recognize the ‘product of conception’ on a sonogram as their child was problematic for NARAL. The abortion lobby didn’t want viewers to see on television what every expectant mother can see in a sonogram – that the child within her is a growing human being, not just a blob of dark matter. The ad didn’t ‘humanize’ the ‘fetus,’ God did.”
NARAL’s effort to categorize unborn children as less than fully human, Moore wrote, illustrates the reality that “in our sin, we want to keep our illusions – whatever they are – that enable us to silence the conscience within us. We want to, in short, walk in darkness. But Jesus is the ‘light of the world.’”
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said Feb. 8 on his podcast The Briefing, “An organization that is so threatened by an ad such as this is an organization that must know at its heart it is based upon a lie. An organization that has to refer to an advertisement featuring the ultrasound of an unborn baby as ‘humanizing fetuses’ is an organization with death at its heart and the stench of death on its breath.”
Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies and director of the Center for Gospel and Culture at Boyce College, said Doritos and NARAL were both in the wrong, but NARAL was worse.
“The @Doritos commercial was tasteless and banal,” Burk tweeted, “but the @NARAL tweet was petulant and inhumane. Doritos wins.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE – David Roach is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service.)