Life Sells Chips (or, Chips Sell Life)

If you want to sell something, what better place than the most-watched television program of the year?  That, as those who follow American football or American pop culture could tell you, would be the Super Bowl, the National Football League’s annual championship game. Small wonder that advertisers spend millions of dollars for a single 30 second ad during the broadcast. Most often these ads are for things like beer, cell phones, cars, insurance, etc., but sometimes something a little different shows up.  Six years ago, for instance, Focus on the Family ran a pro-life ad featuring the mother of college football star Tim Tebow, which created a lot of discussion about the cause of life and, as I detailed in this post last week, saved at least one life.

Freddy Carstairs appearing in Doritos Super Bowl Ad (image from youTube)

    A Super Bowl ad promoting human life made waves again last night . . . but not in quite the same way as the Tebow ad did.  The commercial in question was advertising Doritos tortilla chips.  In this one, we see a mother happily looking at an ultrasound image of her late-stage unborn baby on a monitor; the mother then turns to her husband, who is contentedly munching on Doritos.  To the mother’s increasing annoyance, the father waves one of the salty snacks in front of the screen, where we can see the unborn baby reaching for the chip.  Finally, the exasperated mother grabs the chip from her husband’s hand and hurls it at her feet, at which point the unborn baby on the monitor, apparently eager to eat the chip, appears to dive for the “exit”, at which point the mother goes into labor.

    First of all, it’s a pretty sure bet that this ad is not intended (certainly not by Frito-Lay, the producer of Doritos) to make a pro-life statement.  According to an article that ran a couple weeks ago on lifesitenews.com, the creator of the ad, an Australian filmmaker named Peter Carstairs, came up with the idea when he saw ultrasound images of his unborn son Freddy (who was born last year). There is no indication that Carstairs was looking to make a pro-life statement; he did find the concept funny.  Frito-Lay chose Carstairs’ ad, no doubt because it tested well, and was unusual enough to stand out from the the welter of weird and ridiculous ads striving to make an impression upon Super Bowl viewers.

Ultrasound baby reaching for chip (image from Youtube)

    And make an impression it did, in some cases positive, in some . . . less so.  Apparently, NARAL PRo-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League) found this tortilla-affirming commercial to be guilty of the shameful “antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses” (see article here), demonstrating yet again that pro-abortion fanatics cannot abide any suggestion that unborn humans are, well, human.  That’s why they insist on using dehumanizing terms like “fetus”.  That is also why they despise ultrasound, because sonograms make unavoidably obvious the already irrefutable scientific fact that unborn babies are not just “clumps of cells”, but little people.  Their objection to this particular commercial is not so much that the “fetus” is doing things that an unborn baby can’t do, but that the ultrasound image is being shown at all.  That’s why they fight tooth and nail against laws mandating that women seeking abortion first be shown an ultrasound of the “product of conception” in their womb: because ultrasound changes minds, even ordinary ultrasounds of unborn humans doing ordinary things.  As I detail in my post “The Truth Is Our Ally In The Fight For Human Life”:

    The abortion providers can only argue that simply requiring them to show truthful, unaltered pictures of what (or more accurately, as the images show, who) is being aborted will dissuade some of their customers.  A federal court, in striking down one of these laws in North Carolina, said in its decision [according to pro-life attorney Howard Slugh] that the law “explicitly promotes a pro-life message by demanding the provision of facts that all fall on one side of the abortion debate.”  Notice that the law does not require the suppression of “facts” that fall on the other side of the debate: it simply requires that the mother know all the facts before undergoing abortion, and the facts happen to be pro-life.  And so the abortionists are reduced to asking the court to help them hide the plain, incontrovertible truth.  As Slugh notes:

All these sources agree that the more a mother knows about her child, the less likely she is to abort him.  This is not because ultrasound images are misleading or politicized; it is because they supply a mother with truthful information necessary for making an informed choice.

Champion of Human Life?

    Last night’s silly little Doritos ad, has (most likely unintentionally) reminded millions of people about the truth of human life in the womb. I doubt that Frito-Lay was trying to make a pro-life statement with their ad: they probably saw it as just a funny take on an everyday experience that would help them sell chips.  It’s quite possible that, if they determine that the unfavorable attention from abortion promoters is hurting the bottom line, they may issue an apology and pull the ad from the internet (if YouTube doesn’t do it first).  Let’s hope not; we shouldn’t allow the abortion industry and its apologists to silence the Truth.  It might even be worth buying a bag of Doritos . . .   

LIFE SELLS

 

Tim Tebow

     This coming Sunday, as Americans and those who follow American football will know, is “Super Bowl Sunday”, when the National Football League has its annual championship game.  Since this sporting event typically has a larger television audience than any other program, advertisers pay enormous amounts of money for advertising time during the game. Over the years they have concocted increasingly bizarre commercials in order to catch the attention of that massive audience: twenty years ago an ad featuring an alligator and some frogs stealing a case of beer to the tune of Bob Marley's "Jammin'" [here] was a big hit; this year there will be an ad for ketchup and mustard [here] featuring dachshunds running around wearing hot dog buns (I'm not sure how appetizing most people will find it); over the past few decades there have been countless commercials that have gone as far as possible to employ the old advertising maxim, "sex sells" (sorry, no link to those).  The curious result has been, at least in years when the action on the field hasn't been particularly arresting, most of the chatter the next day is about the ads and not the game itself.
     Interestingly, the most discussed commercial six years ago was not bizarre at all: it simply showed a mother talking about her son [here] (o.k., he does appear to tackle her at the end, but that’s pretty tame for a Superbowl commercial).  The mother was Pam Tebow and her son, Tim, had just compiled one of the most spectacular college football records in memory (which, unfortunately, would not translate into comparable success as a professional).  The reason why this ad was more controversial that all those others ones filled with innuendo and grotesquery is that it was a pro-life ad.  Mrs. Tebow was talking about why she did not follow doctors’ advice and abort the baby who later became one of the most celebrated college athletes ever.  That, apparently, was shocking.

Avita Grace Wood

    

     Now, a few years later, comes the story of another child, Avita Grace Wood, whose life was saved by the same commercial.  Her mother, Susan Wood, had agreed to abort the unborn Avita, at the insistence of her boyfriend, the child’s father.  After seeing the Pam Tebow commercial, however, Susan changed her mind and chose life (full story here). As in the case of the numerous accounts of women who chose not to abort because of 40 Days for Life and other pro-life efforts, we are reminded that our faith, prayer, and witness can change hearts and save lives.  We just need to keep moving the ball down to the field.

(This Throwback is an updated version of a post that was first published as part of my Sunday Snippets post on 1 February 2015)

Where Have All The Fathers Gone? (from Nisi Dominus)

Today is the Solemnity of St. Joseph, which seems a good time to republish this post on the importance of Fatherhood (originally posted January 22nd, 2014)

Decline of Fatherhood

It's not easy being the Dad . . . Federico Barrocci's Aeneas' Flight From Troy

      One of the largest elephants in the room today (if I may further abuse an already overworked metaphor) is the decline of fatherhood.  It is just one of the factors in the implosion of the traditional family, but it’s a - make that the - key one. If you google “the importance of the father” you’ll find 98,600,000 results. That’s 98 plus million. These are not mostly religious or conservative sources: most are related to various universities or government agencies, some are mainstream magazines not known for their cultural conservatism, such as Parenting and Psychology Today. Whatever their perspective they all have the same general message: growing up without a father is bad. Real bad.
     In order to get a sense of the immensity of the problem  . . .

(Read the entire post HERE at Nisi Dominus)

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (1 Feb 2015)

     Happy Sunday, Brothers and Sisters, and welcome to another installment of Sunday Snippets – A Catholic Carnival.  This is a weekly gathering of Catholic bloggers who share their posts for the week past; we gather here at This That and the Other Thing, home of our Chief Snippeteer, RAnn.

     I’ll get to my snippets in a moment, but first . . . IMPORTANT NOTICE: The following narrative is not about football . . . well, at least not only about football.  But it does start there, so please stay with me.  Today, as Americans and others who follow American Football know, is “Super Bowl Sunday”, when the National Football League has its annual championship game.  Since this sporting event typically has a larger television audience than any other program, advertisers pay enormous amounts of money for advertising time during the game. Over the years they have concocted increasingly bizarre commercials in order to catch the attention of that massive audience, with the curious result that in years when the action on the field isn’t particularly arresting, most of the chatter the next day is about the ads and not the game itself.

Tim Tebow

     Interestingly, the most discussed commercial five years ago was not bizarre at all: it simply showed a mother talking about her son (o.k., he does appear to tackle her at the end, but that’s pretty tame for a Superbowl commercial).  The mother was Pam Tebow and her son, Tim, had just completed one of the most spectacular college football records in memory (which, unfortunately, would not translate into comparable success as a professional).  The reason why this ad was more controversial that all those others ones filled with innuendo and grotesquery is that it was a pro-life ad.  Mrs. Tebow was talking about why she did not follow doctors’ advice and abort the baby who later became one of the most celebrated college athletes ever.  That, apparently, was shocking.

     Now, five years later, comes the story of another child, Avita Grace Wood, whose life was saved by the same commercial.  Her mother, Susan Wood, had agreed to abort the unborn Avita, at the insistence of her boyfriend, the child’s father.  After seeing the Pam Tebow commercial, however, Susan changed her mind and chose life (full story here). As in the case of the numerous accounts of women who chose not to abort because of 40 Days for Life and other pro-life efforts, we are reminded that our faith, prayer, and witness can change hearts and save lives.  We just need to keep moving the ball down to the field.

Now, on to our post-game wrap-up of the past week at Principium et Finis:

Monday – “Alessandro Scarlatti – Exsultante Deo”  Another beautiful treasure from the Catholic storehouse of sacred music.

Tuesday – “Abortion Myth #1”  The first of the series, this one examines the foundational falsehood that women were dying by the thousands before Roe vs. Wade made it all better.

And – “Principium et Finis World Headquarters, 27 January 2015" 

This is nothing but a twenty second clip of snow blowing in my yard during Tuesday’s blizzard.  That’s it.  There’s no commentary, nothing.  And it received more page views than anything else all week. What’s up with that?

Wednesday – “DoesSt. Thomas Really Give Assent To Dissent?” 

A few years back, long before I had a blog, I got tired of people telling me that they could still be Catholics in good standing while supporting contraception, pro-abortion politicians, gay marriage, various varieties of fornication, etc., because St. Thomas Aquinas said that you had to follow your conscience, even if it contradicted Church Teaching! I wrote up a little response discussing what the Angelic Doctor actually had to say on the matter, which eventually became the first thing I ever blogged about; it seemed appropriate to revisit it on the goodDoctor’s feast day.

Thursday – “Don’tGive Up On Catholic Education!”  This was Catholic Education Week, so for Throwback Thursday I brought back this piece from last summer, first written in response to an invitation from our own RAnn to discuss the question of whether Catholic Education is worth our time and resources.

Friday – “A DarkMatter: ‘Proving’ God In A Materialistic World”  We Catholics know that Faith and Reason are not in conflict, but in fact are different aspects of the same truth.  The conventional wisdom out in The World says otherwise.  Here’s one approach I’ve used to try to get high school students to understand the relationship between faith and reason a little better: it involves using Dark Matter to shed a little Light.

It was a Snowy Week at Principium et Finis - with another storm coming tomorrow