The Bishops, the Politicians, and Abortion: What Would St. John Fisher Do?

  "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

Joe and Jill Biden at Mass

     The quote above is often attributed to communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky.  There is no record of his actually having said it, but it's widely repeated because it pithily sums up a terrifying truth about the relentlessness of war.  In an age when a large and influential segment of the population wages political warfare on all who seem to stand in the way of their urgent drive to replace reality as it is with a vaguely envisioned utopia, we can amend that to "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you."

 For a long time now the Catholic bishops in the United States have dabbled in politics, mostly in a manner that we would call "virtue signaling" today: a statement about nuclear war in the 1980s, expressions of concern about capital punishment in the 1990s, some hand-wringing about immigration in more recent years.  All issues with legitimate moral dimensions, it's true, but all likewise issues on which serious Catholics can have legitimate differences of opinion.  In none of them were the bishops confronting Catholics or others who were clearly advocating anything directly contrary to the moral law, or promoting an intrinsic evil.  And for what it's worth, none of them are areas in which Catholic bishops have particular competence.

  Over the same stretch of time there has been another issue looming, one which is indeed a matter of intrinsic evil, about which there is no room for prudential judgment, and which is very much within the competence of the episcopacy: abortion.

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]

Killing Is Not Compassion

There has been a lot of attention recently to the push to legitimize abortions up to and even, in some cases, after birth. Less visible, but no less relentless, is the ongoing campaign to make death the legal remedy to any number of complaints at the other end of the the life cycle. It seems a good time to bring back this Worth Revisiting post first published 5 February 2017.

To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him . . . (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

True Crime Story?

    Imagine you’re reading a book, or watching a film.  In this story a caregiver, a trusted figure, secretly puts a sleep-inducing drug in the coffee of an unsuspecting person under her care.  Once the victim is no longer conscious, the perpetrator tries to administer a more powerful drug, a lethal drug.  The victim wakes up and, clinging to life, fights back.  The caregiver calls upon accomplices (from the victim’s own family, no less!) to restrain her, and forcibly administers the deadly injection. Sounds like a crime thriller, doesn’t it?  But wait, there’s more . . . here the story changes from a crime thriller into a Kafkaesque dystopian nightmare. The deed comes to the attention of the authorities, who conclude that the killer should indeed go to trial . . . but not to punish her wicked crime.  Rather, despite conceding the lurid details above, they conclude that she “acted in good faith”, and seek a trial in order to establish a legal precedent that other health care providers may likewise kill unknowing, and even unwilling, persons without fear of punishment.

Healer, or killer? (detail from painting by Mikhail V. Nesterov)

    As you may have guessed, the scenario above is in fact a true story, which recently took place in the Netherlands, as detailed in this article from LifeNews.com. The only major detail left out of my retelling, and the only thing (at least in the minds of the Dutch Review Committee that investigated the case) that makes what appears to be an act of unspeakable wickedness into a “good faith” medical procedure, is the fact that the victim was suffering from dementia.  As more and more places are following the Netherlands along the path of the legalized killing of the old, infirm, and, increasingly, those who are simply unhappy, it would be wise to take a look at cases like this to see what lies ahead.

In the Eyes of the Law

Prof. Theo Boer (Daily Mail photo)

    The case above is a chilling illustration of how, once we cross the line of giving legal sanction to the direct taking of innocent life, we unleash a force beyond our control, in which the “logic” of death overwhelms supposedly rational considerations.  Let’s start with what Dutch law provides for, and see how it compares to what actually happened in the situation above.  Theo Boer, a professor of Health Care Ethics at Kampen Theological Seminary in the Netherlands recently published an article in the British Catholic Medical Quarterly explaining why he no longer favors the pioneering Dutch law allowing physician assisted suicide. We’ll get to his reasons in a moment; first I’d like to take a look at his summary of the law in question.  Pr. Boer explains that, according to Dutch law:  

-1. “First, there should be a request from the patient” - There was no such request, and in fact, according to an article in the UK’s Daily Mail,

. . . the patient said several times ‘I don’t want to die’ in the days before she was put to death, and that the doctor had not spoken to her about what was planned because she did not want to cause unnecessary extra distress. She also did not tell her about what was in her coffee as it was also likely to cause further disruptions to the planned euthanasia process.

-2.  “there should be unbearable suffering without prospect of improvement” - The daily Mail tells us that “she often exhibited signs of fear and anger, and would wander around the building at nights. The nursing home senior doctor was of the opinion that she was suffering intolerably”, but  adds that “she was no longer in a position where she could confirm that the time was now right for the euthanasia to go ahead”. In other words, in the subjective judgment of outside observers her life was no longer “worth living”; other facts in the case indicate that the person living that life didn’t concur in that judgment.

-3. “the doctor should inform the patient of his situation” - demonstrably no.

-4. “doctor and patient together should have come to the conclusion that there is no acceptable alternative” - again, manifestly not.

-5. “the doctor should have consulted a colleague” - it is unclear from the Daily Mail article whether the “senior doctor” is the same who administered the lethal injection, but it is likely that more than one doctor on the staff participated in discussing the case.  If so, this is the one and only point on which the doctor would seem to have complied with the actual requirements of the law.

-6. “The assisted dying should take place in a medically sound manner” - well . . .

. . . secretly drugging a patient, then forcibly injecting her as she fights for her life doesn’t fit my standard of sound medical manner, but others may have a different opinion. In any case, the attending physician incontestably violated provisions 1,3, and 4 of the law, arguably number 2 and, if one is to take a civilized view, number 6 as well.  Setting aside for the moment the morality of any such law (I’ll get to that), the doctor euthanizing this patient blatantly flouted most of the specific provisions of the law. How in this world is it possible that the Review Committee would not only bless the doctor’s efforts, but would also be so confident that the courts would agree?

Gospel of Life

    To answer that question, I suggest we go back to St. John Paul II’s Encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), published in 1995, six years before the passage of the Dutch assisted suicide law.  St. John Paul, in speaking of both legalized abortion and legal euthanasia, wrote (my bold):

The end result of this is tragic: not only is the fact of the destruction of so many human lives still to be born or in their final stage extremely grave and disturbing, but no less grave and disturbing is the fact that conscience itself, darkened as it were by such widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life. (Evangelium Vitae 5)

St. John Paul II

In other words, not only are the acts themselves immoral and unjust, but they tend to corrupt the moral understanding of society as a whole, and consequently the morals of everyone in it.  Why should we expect anyone to honor the specific provisions of man’s laws if we no longer recognize the legitimacy of the moral law, God’s Law, itself?

    There is a clear pattern to the way this corruption works in concrete instances, which we can see in the legal history of contraception and abortion over the past century: The rare, extreme case is offered as an exception to a ban on something that had previously been considered intrinsically wrong; once the line has been breached, however, there is no longer any reason in principle to deny to others what was at first permitted to only a few.  If it’s not wrong for married couples experiencing certain difficulties to use contraception, why should it be wrong for others? If it’s not murder for one woman to abort her baby, how can it be so for another? We have now seen the same thing happen here in the United States with marijuana laws: first only “medical” marijuana for people with glaucoma and other conditions, but followed in short order by the general lifting of restrictions.  We should expect that, once rare “hard cases” have been used to legitimize legal euthanasia, the killing will become increasingly more commonplace, and “acceptable” in an ever wider range of situations.

It Can’t Happen Here . . . Can It?

    Pr. Boers details how this exact thing has happened in the Netherlands with assisted suicide and direct euthanasia.  The law was proposed to apply to people who were suffering late-stage terminal illness and suffering extreme pain.  Before very many years, those people became the exception to the rule:

. . . what was once considered a last resort, now becomes a default mode of dying for an increasing number of people. The unbearable character of the suffering is lesser described in terms of physical suffering and more in terms of ‘meaningless waiting’.

    In fact, most of the people requesting euthanasia aren’t dying at all:

Whereas in the first years hardly any patients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise. Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering consisted in age related complaints. Loneliness occurs in 50 out of the last 500 cases that I reviewed before stepping back. Many of these patients could have lived for months, others for years or even decades. We have seen a number of ground breaking cases: ‘euthanasia for two’, for example couples in which the caregiver gets cancer and his partner chooses to die the same day and the same way; euthanasia in blindness; euthanasia for a man with autism who fears retirement; assisted dying for a mother of two suffering from tinnitus. Undeniably, assisted dying for one group of patients leads to demands from others.

    Similar results are reported in Oregon, the first US state to legalize assisted suicide, and in other states that have followed since.  There, the most common reason given is the abstract, amorphous "loss of autonomy" (see chart below). Less than a third cite pain (and not all of those are actually experiencing pain: for some it is only fear of possible pain). In fact, the most common factor among those seeking assisted suicide is not pain or terminal illness but depression, a treatable, non-fatal condition.  Studies conducted in both the United States and the UK indicate that over 90% of those seeking assisted suicide are suffering from mental problems. Nevertheless most of these people receive no psychiatric assistance prior to their death.   In fact, we have seen in the United States, and Pr. Boer reports the same in the Netherlands, that the doctors who preside over these deaths often have no professional relationship at all with their patients, and sometimes don’t even know them.

The Law as a Teacher

    The idea that “The Law is a Teacher” is an old one, going back at least to St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  So what does a law permitting killing people because they are old or sick teach us?  Surely it sends the message that human life is not sacrosanct, but instead something that can be disposed of when it becomes difficult . . . and if difficult lives are expendable, then why not inconvenient lives?  And where do we go from there?  St. John Paul explains that:

It is a problem which exists at the cultural, social and political level, where it reveals its more sinister and disturbing aspect in the tendency, ever more widely shared, to interpret the above crimes against life as legitimate expressions of individual freedom, to be acknowledged and protected as actual rights.  (Evangelium Vitae 18)

    Pr. Boer, in language strikingly like that in the passage above, confirms that such has in fact been the case in the Netherlands, saying that “there is a shift in public opinion. Whereas in the beginning assisted dying was seen as a last resort, public opinion is shifting towards considering it a right” (my italics).  Boer goes even further, however, adding:

. . . public opinion is shifting towards considering it a right, with a corresponding duty on doctors to act. A law that is now in the making obliges doctors who refuse to actively refer their patients to a ‘willing’ colleague.

The Culture of Death

Dance of Death by Venne Adriaen Pietersz

   We can expect the pressure on doctors to participate in killing to grow more intense in jurisdictions that have legalized euthanasia.  The idea of such killing as a legitimate good likewise puts pressure on family members to seek it for loved ones who may be unable to ask for it themselves (which may have been a factor in the Dutch case discussed above), and also on those who are themselves suffering to “spare” their relatives the trouble of caring for them.  This very concern is among the most cited reasons given by those asking for assisted suicide or euthanasia.  And so we see the corrupting power of sin: doctors, who have dedicated themselves to healing, are increasingly compelled to do the opposite and kill; close family members see themselves in mortal conflict with those whom they love . . . and killing off grandma becomes little more exceptional than "putting to sleep" the family dog.

    That’s the future that’s in store for us if we continue down the path of killing as a remedy for suffering, old age, and mere ennui.  We can look forward to more and more people implicated in ever greater acts of injustice, and ever wider waves of corruption spreading throughout society as a whole.  As we can see from events in the Netherlands this is no longer conjecture, but, in many places, a reality, a reality famously described by St. John Paul II as a "culture of death"  (Evangelium Vitae 12). The people who are relentlessly pushing Death as the solution to a myriad of problems will try to paint killing as “compassionate”, but the truth is very different. Killing is not Compassion.     

Ireland, Post-Christianity and Eternity

     My, how the world has changed. The dust is still settling from the referendum in Ireland last week in which voters repealed the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which protected the right of unborn babies to live.  The outcome was a bitter disappointment, but not really a surprise.  Perhaps more surprising to many of us (although it ought not to have been: see below) was the margin of the pro-abortion victory: 67%-33%, a thunderous landslide. Ironically, the amendment was voted in by the same margin just 35 years ago, except in 1983 67% of Irish voters cast their ballots in favor of protecting unborn life. The dramatic reversal reminds me of the tune played by the British military bands when they surrendered to George Washington’s ragtag Continental Army at Yorktown: “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Crowd in Dublin cheers abolition of Irish pro-life amendment (AP)

    Clearly, much has changed in Ireland over the last three and a half decades, and there are certainly plenty of local factors that have played a role in the change.  I don’t believe, however, that the change is a purely Irish one, or even largely local. Despite a strong historical identification with Catholicism, the Emerald Isle has been following the same secularizing trend that has captured the rest of Western Europe.  According to research done by the Pew Center, only 37% percent of Irish attend religious services weekly or monthly; that’s better than any other Western European nation other than Italy, but it’s still well under half of the population (and it has been shown that oftentimes people are untruthful on this question, exaggerating church attendance figures). A larger figure, 41%, report they “seldom or never” go to church.  Only 19% pray daily, 24% believe in God “with absolute certainty”, and only 69% believe in God at all.

     The Irish are only marginally better, if at all, than other Europeans in these categories. We see similar trends in the United States, where, according to the Barna Group,

The pattern is indisputable: The younger the generation, the more post-Christian it is. Nearly half of Millennials (48%) qualify as post-Christian compared to two-fifths of Gen X-ers (40%), one-third of Boomers (35%) and one-quarter of Elders (28%).

     The entire western world is abandoning Christianity, and at a rapid rate. Needless to say, these changes carry some very concrete consequences. Pew also reports, for instance, that the higher the level of religious commitment, the more likely a person is to be involved with charitable organizations and, in fact, every sort of community group (except athletic ones).  Arthur Brooks details similar findings in the United States in his book Who Really Cares?  These numbers show that fewer believing Christians means less charitable giving, less involvement in charitable causes, less self-sacrifice for the good of others; in other words, if I may be blunt, a more selfish, self-centered society.  This de-Christianizing trend intensifies over time, because the more disconnected they are from any practice of religion, the harder it becomes for people to recognize even the largely material goods provided by the Church: Barna reports that

When the unchurched were asked to describe what they believe are the positive and negative contributions of Christianity in America, almost half (49%) could not identify a single favorable impact of the Christian community, while nearly two-fifths (37%) were unable to identify a negative impact.

Pew reports similar outcomes in Europe. This is despite the massive amount of wealth, material and effort Christians have put into helping the poor and disadvantaged over the past two millennia.

From The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah

     Given all that, we should not be surprised that Christian moral teachings, particularly those that demand self-sacrifice or denial of powerful desires, are less popular than ever, and rapidly becoming less so.  From the very beginning of time the Tempter has been whispering in our ears that “You will be like God” (Genesis 3:5), if only we would give in to our desires, instead of following the path of self-denial.  How hard is it to resist him when we have no faith, or perhaps only a shallow faith, to fortify us?  How much harder now that the institutions that dominate our culture, which in the past reinforced morality, have today switched sides, and take Satan’s side in the debate (take note: every major political party in Ireland endorsed repeal of the 8th amendment)? Small wonder, then, that Pew's figures show the people of once Catholic Ireland favoring legal abortion by a margin of 66-30% (those who self-identify as “highly committed Christians” are the only group in which a majority opposes it).  Consequently, small wonder that Irish voters abolished the protection of unborn life by roughly the same margin.

     Well then, where does that leave us?  Am I saying that we are going to Hell in the proverbial handbasket?  Ultimately, no, as our Lord has promised us that “the gates of Hell will not prevail” against his Church (Matthew 16:17). “Prevail”, however, is statement about where things will end; a lot can happen in the meanwhile, not all of it good. The fact is that an enormous amount of damage can occur, to individual souls and to entire populations, before our wayward society comes to its senses.

     Very often it is the damage itself that helps bring about the change.  As St. Paul tells us, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:48). The familiar phrase “hitting rock bottom” applies here.  This is a very important concept in Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12 Step groups.  An alcoholic “hits rock bottom” when the damage and pain caused by his drinking become so severe and painful that he has to admit his life is beyond his control, and that he needs to turn to God to save him from his self-destructive desires.  Our culture, it would seem, needs to hit rock bottom before it begins to turn back to God.  Who can say how long that will take, or how many souls will be lost in the process?  I am painfully reminded of Adam Smith’s remark that “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”  We should also not forget that the followers of Muhammed are not standing idly by while what was once called  “Christendom” breaks itself to pieces.

     However that may be, formerly Catholic Ireland’s embrace of the abortion license is a sign of what is happening throughout the historic heart of the Christian world.  There is no longer a Catholic Ireland . . . there's no longer a "Catholic" anywhere in Europe or North America (with the possible exception of Poland, and that probably not for long).  Earlier this week I republished a blog post about a radio address delivered almost half a century ago by a German Theologian named Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI).  Fr. Ratzinger foresaw a world slipping ever further into Godlessness.  In that increasingly hostile environment, Christ’s Church would become smaller - perhaps much smaller.  It would, at the same time, be a Church purified by adversity, more faithful to the Gospel, and more essential than ever:

We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

That is increasingly the choice before us if we wish to follow Jesus Christ: a small, unfashionable, and even persecuted Church, one which “will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members” than we might be used to, or be comfortable with.

     It is also clear that we will need to commit ourselves ever more faithfully to live lives worthy of our Lord.  Christ tells us,

"You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men. (Matthew 5:13)

 Whatever else might have been happening, the failures of prominent Catholics in the Irish church played a role in the triumph of legal abortion there, a living example of how damaging “salt that has lost its taste” can be.  If hope to do any better ourselves, we will need to rely more than ever on the help Jesus Christ offers us in the sacramental life, because the world of the future will need the Church, more than it ever has, to be a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6).

Zambians attending Mass (www.southworld.net)

     One bright spot I haven’t yet mentioned: while the historic heart of Christendom collapses, the faith still burns brightly on the periphery, particularly in Africa.  As Europe and North America increasingly revert to mission territory, I fully expect our brothers in Christ to the South will be there to help us find our way back.  However difficult things become, Christ will provide a way.  

     That, of course, is our brightest spot: the Salvation that Christ has promised, which is the foundation of Christian Hope.  Short term, the future looks grim, and we need to accept that and prepare ourselves for it. While the present defeat in Ireland is a stark sign of how far we have fallen, however,  it is not a reason for despair.  After all, the Lord has given his word:

There shall no more be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall worship him; they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads. And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever. (Revelation 22:3-7)

4th Day of Christmas: Holy Innocents and Holy Innocence

Today is the 4th Day of Christmas. In the family group of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus we see God's plan for the family (more on that this coming Sunday, the Feast of the Holy Family).  Today’s Feast of the Holy Innocents shows us how much The World (here in the person of King Herod) respects God’s plan. Today's feast commemorates Herod’s slaughter of every male child two years old and younger in Bethlehem, by which the wicked old despot was trying to snuff out the Messiah that, according to the Magi, had been born there. The Holy Family, however, escaped when Joseph was warned in a dream (see Matthew 1:18-25).

Massacre of the Holy Innocents by Francois-Joseph Navez

The most obvious present-day reflection of the murder of the Holy Innocents two thousand years ago is the wholesale massacre of unborn children by the millions through abortion today. The horror of this slaughter, and the callousness of its perpetrators, was brought into sharp focus in the past couple of years by the release of undercover videos documenting the flourishing commerce in the body parts of the abortion industry’s tiny victims.

We see a subtler echo of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents in those youngsters who have dodged the abortionist, but are robbed of their Holy Innocence by our pornified pop culture.  Children today are directly in the path of a constant flood of degraded and degrading sexuality that pervades entertainment and advertising, blares out of televisions in airports and doctors’ waiting rooms, and has commandeered the curriculum in public (and to a remarkable degree in private, even religious) schools.  We can see the results in the ongoing dissolution of the family and the attendant host of social ills that inescapably follows.

Here’s where the Holy Family can show us the way.  Just as Joseph and Mary brought Baby Jesus to Egypt to protect him from Herod’s soldiers, we can work to provide some safety for our own children, and other children in our care. It’s true, of course, that even measures such as internet filters and homeschooling can provide only so much protection.  Moreover, critics are quick to point out that nobody remains a child forever: eventually we must all face the world’s challenges.  Quite true - and the Holy Family did not linger in Egypt, nor did the grown Jesus remain an obscure carpenter in his parents’ home.  Nevertheless, aside from one incident at the temple in his twelfth year, he waited until His Time Had Come before he took up his Cross and walked the path to Calvary.  Blessed Pope Paul VI talked about the childhood of Jesus when he visited the Holy Family’s home town of Nazareth.  Blessed Paul said, in part:

 How gladly would I become a child again, and go to school once more in this humble and sublime school of Nazareth: close to Mary, I wish I could make a fresh start at learning the true science of life and the higher wisdom of divine truths . . .

Blessed Paul VI in Nazareth

      May the silence of Nazareth teach us recollection, inwardness, the disposition to listen to good inspirations and the teachings of true masters. May it teach us the need for and the value of preparation, of study, of meditation, of personal inner life, of the prayer which God alone sees in secret.

  Next, there is a lesson on family life. May Nazareth teach us what family life is, its communion of love, its austere and simple beauty, and its sacred and inviolable character. Let us learn from Nazareth that the formation received at home is gentle and irreplaceable. Let us learn the prime importance of the role of the family in the social order.

The child Jesus was formed and educated under the protection of his family before he went out into the world as a man.  In our world the pimps and pornographers of the popular culture have no more regard for the well-being of our children than Herod did for the children of Bethlehem. Is it too much to ask that we allow them a taste of Nazareth while there’s time?

(To read about babies saved from abortion by Christmas Carols and to hear a hauntingly beautiful version of the 16th century "Coventry Carol", a song inspired by the Holy Innocents, go HERE at Principium et Finis)

Life Sells Chips (or, Chips Sell Life)

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post first appeared on 8 February 2016 on the blog Principium et Finis. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers please see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Alison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

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 and/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 [7 Feb 2016] . . . 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 at 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), and thought it would be a funny and (most importantly) an effective way to sell chips.  Frito-Lay chose Carstairs’ ad 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, well, 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 (which everybody watching knows: that's what makes it funny), 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,  even ordinary ultrasound images of unborn humans doing ordinary things, changes minds.  As I detail in my post "The Truth Is Pro 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. Again, I doubt very much 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 make people laugh and, consequently, help sell their product.  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.  Who knows? It might even be worth buying a bag of chips . . .   

*A year later, the ad is still there: