Misleading and Distracting Language on Abortion
by Ms. Boomer-ang
In many points relating to abortion, the most commonly-heard voices distract our attention from what we really need to know and keep us focused on minor or misleading parts of the story. Following are examples:
1. Media reporting on parents trying (unsuccessfully or successfully) to prevent their daughters from having abortions diverts attention from and covers up the probably much more common cases of parents forcing their daughters to have abortions against their will.1
2. The media often claims that where abortion is illegal, women die in illegal abortions. But women dying in legal abortions is so common that Feminists for Life has a page on its website with examples, called “We Remember.” See also a list of patient deaths at Planned Parenthood alone.
3. The media often covers people arrested for having or providing abortions where they are illegal, while ignoring the pro-life political prisoners, including in the United States, like Heather Idoni.
4. When people equate “forced birth” with fascism, why don’t we point out that abortion and infanticide (of “deformed” or “bad ancestry” children) are a cornerstone of fascism? In fact, don’t fascist societies have examples of abortion without choice?
5. Misusing the word “choice,” including to describe when support for abortion is unconditional and opposition to forced abortion is conditional.
Don’t many pro-life voices make this mistake too? It is easy to use words, phrases, and concepts the way “everybody else does,” often after hearing them on television and other media, “where even people who disagree repeat them.”2
6. Calling abortion a “strictly religious issue.” Why don’t we point out all the non-religious pro-life voices and mention organizations like Secular Pro-Life?
7. Calling morning after pills and abortion pills “Plan B.” For many people who use them, aren’t they Plan A? And as for those who take them only when it is snuck into their food or medicine without their knowledge, they could be Plan Zero. And what Plan number are they for those who take them only to fulfill requirements, such as for school or social services?
8. When someone says that the morning after pill prevents abortions, how about pointing out that it still doesn’t prevent the killing of fertilized pre-embryos? The actual difference is that we never know whether there were any pre-embryos to kill and whether they would have miscarried on their own.
9. Shouldn’t we ask:
a. what the effects are of taking morning after pills several times in one menstrual cycle?
b. what are the effects of morning after and abortion pills ingested inadvertently by people other than fertile women? For example, when they are snuck into food, and it’s impossible to control who eats it? Consider especially post-menopausal women, pre-pubescent girls, males, hemophiliacs, and people with certain kinds of cancer.
10. When the media celebrates aid organizations like UNICEF for giving refugee women in places like Congo morning after and abortion pills, how about asking whether this is upon the woman’s request, consent, and knowledge? Are they required to take them for admission to shelter camps? Are the pills mixed with other medicine and the women not clearly told that, if they are pregnant, they will cause miscarriages?
11. When a report claims that abortion rates are highest in some places where abortion is illegal, shouldn’t we scrutinize the calculation of these rates? In comparisons, shouldn’t we study whether the figures for all places used the same data? Unfortunately, even some pro-life voices have repeated rather than confronting these reports.
a. What is counted in the number of abortions? In some places, was every morning after pill snuck into food, often with no guarantee who ate it, counted as a requested sought abortion? Meanwhile, in other places, a morning after pill taken deliberately after intercourse by a fertile woman in the fertile stage of her cycle was not counted as even a fraction of an abortion.
b. Typically the abortion rate means abortions per a certain number of women. But additional measures should receive attention. Would the statistics be different when using the ratio of abortions to live births? When using the percent of women who have at least one abortion? Doesn’t each of these three statistics have a different psychological impact on society?
12. When the media spotlights doctors who move from places that restrict abortions, why don’t we report doctors who move to such places? In fact, a study of over 60,000 OB-GYNs, explained here, suggested that the share of physicians who are OB-GYNs decreased less in states that restored abortion restrictions.
13. When somebody equates forbidding abortions to requiring blood donations, organ donations, or Caesarean births, how about pointing out that abortion is more similar to these three procedures than carrying a pregnancy to term? Abortion, like the three procedures, requires intervention. Carrying most pregnancies to term need not require intervention.
FOOTNOTES
- Examples: Doris Kalasky, Elliott Institute Newsletter, Winter 1993-1994; and abortiondocs.org-content/uploads/2020/02
- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (New York: Random House, 2017), pp. 59-60
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For more of our posts on dialog and persuasion, see:
If You Can’t Explain the Opposition to Your Case
Two Practical Dialogue Tips for Changing More Minds about Abortion
Dialog on Life Issues: Avoiding Some Obstacles to Communication
It should be noticed that UNICEF tries to help children after they are born. They support their elimination before that. UNICEF, like the United Nations, is now fully pro-abortion.