REMEMBER when the debate was about Pregnancy Related Services? And the debate was fierce, with folks like Ted Kennedy in Washington pounding his desk, demanding more of it. At first, many of us wondered why. What was all the fuss about? How could anybody be against pregnancy related services? Why, that has to be something like free prenatal vitamins and maybe a government-sponsored foot rub for the lady. Of course, as slow as we are, we did eventually catch up to euphemism in this debate. Pregnancy related services meant pregnancy ending services, aka abortion on demand.
Words will tell, even if people sometimes don’t. It was many years ago when pro-choice replaced abortion rights on bumper stickers. It’s so much easier to claim to be for choice. Especially if there’s only one option to choose from. Pro-choice instead of abortion. Pregnancy related services instead of abortion. Any word or phrase to keep from being clear. It’s sorta like calling places where abortions are performed “clinics.” In this debate, one side is always muddying the water, and language.
So maybe we should thank the abortion-rights folks for, at least this once, being transparent. The paper said the other day that advocates for abortion in this state are fighting four different laws passed by the Arkansas legislature this year. Why? Because the laws “could effectively end abortion care in the state for many women.”
Abortion care? Is that what it’s called nowadays? Our considered editorial opinion is: good. At least the word abortion is in there somewhere.
But care? It certainly can’t be care, it necessarily cannot be care, of any sort, for the baby involved. To some of us, an abortion is exactly the opposite of care when discussing the baby. Or should that be a fetus? Or embryo? Or a group of cells that can be removed like any other unwanted growth?
No, we’ll stick to baby. The man once said that language doesn’t just convey thought; language shapes it, too. When words get fuzzy, so does thought. It’s a baby.
Requests for restraining orders and federal lawsuits are flying around Little Rock. Planned Parenthood and Little Rock Family Planning Services have turned loose their lawyers. (Don’t get us started on the names of these outfits—as if parenthood and families are the objectives of either.)
What are these outfits fighting? 1. Limitations put on the “dilation and evacuation” procedure, which others call dismemberment abortion. 2. A new law that says doctors who perform abortions on young girls must preserve fetal tissue and notify the police in the girl’s town. 3. Legal wording that make doctors notify a woman’s family about their rights, too. 4. And a new law to outlaw abortion based on the sex of the child.
All of it might sound reasonable to reasonable people. But those who favor abortion no matter what, no matter when, must believe in Marshal Foch’s maxim from the First World War: cramponnez partout—hold fast everywhere.
Charles Collins, the state representative from Fayetteville who has good ideas on occasion, sponsored Act 733 that would ban abortions that are sought based on the sex of the baby. He notes that the idea for the legislation came to him after discussions about practices in China, where it has been the practice to abort girls.
“As the world becomes more multicultural,” he said last week, “this just clarifies what I think everybody would agree would be good behavior.” Well, maybe not everybody.
Talbot Camp, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said: “Arkansas politicians have passed extreme abortion bans that put their political agenda ahead of women’s health. No more. We’re fighting back.”
Women’s health? A troublemaker might ask if that includes the health of any little girls who might be aborted. Or are they not counted yet? When should the rest of us consider them fully human? In the third trimester? After they’re born? When they’re old enough to drive?
No, these new laws in Arkansas must go! Dilate and evacuate them. But come up with a better phrase first.
SOMEBODY once said that the Little Round Top of this debate, like in so many other debates, has always been the language. Hold that high ground, and you’ve won a tactical advantage over your opponent. Those who push “abortion care” know that well. Better make it sound like it’s OK to kill, as long as you have a doctor’s excuse.
The Germans didn’t call it mass murder in World War II either; they called it racially purifying the continent. The Armenian Genocide was just a security measure carried out by a Special Organization. In the 1990s, certain Europeans liked to call what they were doing ethnic cleansing, which sounds like a Bosnian or Italian or Spaniard or Frenchman taking a shower.
Maybe all this verbicide today is a symptom of our collective uneasy conscience when it comes to abortion. Maybe that’s why so many of us want to, need to, hide behind phrases like abortion care and pregnancy related services and call our organizations Planned Parenthood and rally around causes like “family planning” and “choice.” To call things what they are may be too difficult.
Pope John Paul II, who famously opposed the culture of death, whether it was abortion or euthanasia, didn’t muddy the waters when he talked abortion. He told the truth. As if it was a commandment of a kind. The pope who’d oversee the fall of the Soviet Empire and a new freedom on Earth took the time throughout his life to argue against abortion and the killing of the least among us. He said such killings were crimes against society. Or as he put it: “Human life finds itself most vulnerable when it enters the world and when it leaves the realm of time to embark upon eternity.”
Call them words to live by. For most of us.