A short commercial produced by Doritos and shown during the Superbowl with its intense media coverage, has triggered lively reactions from NARAL[1]. The baby is shown on the screen during an ultrasound scan. As the father moves the corn crisps, the baby in the womb moves with them. The baby even decides to be born when the mother throws the crisps across the room.
NARAL has directly denounced this advertisement as being an“anti-choice tactic to humanise the foetus”.
Voices are being raised in the other camp in defence of the “cute” albeit slightly “exaggerated” ad. This is the stance adopted by Princeton Professor, Robert George, for example: “Since, however, the foetus in the video was, by all accounts, a human foetus, the offspring of human parents, and not a bovine, canine, or feline foetus, it’s less than clear how it is that the potato crisps company is to blame for the humanization”.
Monsignor Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has warned against a resurgence of voluntarism. Whereas “it has long been established that even a fertilised ovum is already in full possession of human DNA distinct from that of his parents,”he says, “according to NARAL, the child in the womb should not be humanised lest the absolute right to murder that child at any stage of its pre-natal development should be denied”. A philosophical position that goes by the name of voluntarism“is behind much of our discussion of moral issues”today.
Monsignor Barron has focused on the voluntarist inconsistency of the lobby: “As silly as it is to say that 2 + 2 could be equal to 5, it is just as silly to say that a child in the womb is anything but human”.
[1] National Abortion Rights Action League.
Zenit (12/02/2016), Agenda Europe (11/02/2016)