Saul Alinsky reportedly said: “He who controls the language controls the masses.” For decades, abortion supporters have been doing everything in their power to control the language we used to describe abortion — and their dissembling has largely succeeded.
The mainstream media is not even trying to hide it anymore. Note the propaganda here from the folks at the AP Stylebook, which newspapers and media outlets rely on to achieve a consistent style throughout their publications:
Use the modifiers anti-abortion or abortion-rights; don't use pro-life, pro-choice or pro-abortion unless they are in quotes or proper names.
Avoid the term abortionist, which connotes a person who performs clandestine abortions.— APStylebook (@APStylebook) May 3, 2022
The AP knows that there’s nothing fair and balanced about using the word “rights,” which connotes something good and positive, when describing proponents of baby-killing and “anti-” when it comes to those who oppose abortion, but they don’t care. They have bought the lie that unborn infants—with their own unique fingerprints and their own DNA—are merely clumps of cells that can be disposed of and sent to garbage dumps. They don’t dare gaze fully into the faces of the unborn children who have been deemed unworthy to live. They don’t for a moment dare to ponder that during an abortion an innocent child is ripped limb from limb and sucked out of her mother’s womb where, just a few minutes earlier, she was peacefully kicking, napping, or perhaps sucking her tiny thumb.
Leftists avoid using the word abortion like the plague because they know it conjures up images of dead babies. They know that if people stop to think about what actually happens in abortuaries, they will be less likely to support the continued legalization of the gruesome, inhumane practice.
This subterfuge has become so obvious that someone created a website called “Did Joe Biden Say Abortion Yet,” where they report:
After 224 days of refusing to use or say the word ‘abortion’—after Texas’ six-week ban went into effect—the Biden Administration first included the word ‘abortion’ once in a press statement. President Biden has been in office for one year overseeing the current abortion crisis that will inevitably undo Roe v. Wade and he has yet to make a public statement himself about the crisis or use the word ‘abortion.’
The website, which claims to be a project of a pro-abortion group, also notes:
The Biden-Harris Administration has never used the word ‘abortion’ in a statement commemorating the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized the right to an abortion. They didn’t use it in a statement after the failed vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act which would codify Roe v. Wade and enact federal protections for abortion access. He refused to say it in his State of the Union speech.
The group implores readers to “Join the conversation! Tell President Biden it’s time to speak out in support of all of us who’ve had abortions—and say the word abortion!”
More power to them if they think destigmatizing abortion is going to fly with the American people. Everyone who has three brain cells bouncing around in their head is horrified at these women who “shout their abortions” and ingest baby-killing abortion pills on the steps of the Supreme Court. These people have what the Bible describes as “seared consciousness” — they’ve been reveling in evil for so long that they see it as good. May they repent before they have to face God on judgment day.
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I’ll leave you with an excerpt from a fascinating 1946 George Orwell essay called “Politics and the English Language”:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.
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