By Nancy Flanders
(Live Action News) To make the violent and deadly act of abortion appear justifiable, its supporters lean heavily on euphemisms to hide what it truly is. Fetus, choice, reproductive rights, reproductive health care, and bodily autonomy, for example, are carefully crafted words used with purposeful intent to disregard and dehumanize human beings in the first stages of life. To convince people that abortion must be legal, abortion advocates use terminology obscuring what abortion really is — shifting the focus toward the woman and completely away from the human who is killed. It’s a script that proponents have relied on to continue the charade, but that script continues to change. An update to the script was shared by the United States of Women (USOW) on its website.
“How to talk like an abortion advocate” recommends that supporters ditch certain terminology in favor of a new set of euphemisms in order to ensure the act of killing preborn human beings remains legal, unrestricted, and supported.
“Abortion is safe”
The top priority on USOW’s list of how to talk like an advocate is to start saying “abortion is safe,” rather than the former go-to terminology (“make abortion safe,” “dangerous, illegal abortions”), which implied that legalizing abortion would make it safe.
To imply that any abortion — even an illegal one — is “not safe” would apparently not fit the updated narrative. This is a calculated attempt to promote at-home, “self-managed” abortions done via a “no-test” protocol — meaning without even a medical exam, ultrasound, or blood test prior to taking the pill. This is extremely dangerous, and abortion advocates know it. Legalized abortion was built on the idea that women should undergo abortions in a legal medical facility under the supervision of a doctor, and they insisted this would make it safe. Now, the narrative has shifted to insist that it is always safe for women to undergo chemical abortions alone.
However, abortion can never truly be safe, because at least one person dies every time an abortion is successful. Saying abortion is safe, therefore, completely contradicts everything we know about the definition of safety (something unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury). Someone is always harmed during an abortion. Killing is not a safe act, and abortion is killing; therefore, abortion is not safe.
Women do not escape unharmed either, though there is no way to know for sure how many women have suffered physical harm from legal abortion. This is because approximately half of U.S. states are not required to report complications, so “safety” in terms of the harm done to women remains an unknown. Risks, however, include a perforated uterus, hemorrhaging, infection, and death. For the women who have suffered these injuries, abortion was not at all safe.
For women who do manage to escape physical harm, there are sometimes mental health issues to contend with. A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that post-abortive women experience an 81% increased risk of subsequent psychiatric issues, including depression. Teen girls are 10 times more likely to attempt suicide if they have had an abortion in the last six months compared to girls who haven’t, and post-abortive teenage girls are also up to four times more likely to die by suicide compared to adult women. But all post-abortive women face an increased risk of suicide. Two studies found a six to seven times higher suicide rate after abortion, while a third study revealed that a shocking 31% of women who have had abortions have considered suicide afterward.
“People should be trusted to make decisions about their reproductive healthcare that are best for them”
This language assumes that abortion — the intentional killing of a human being in the womb — is a form of health care. Health care prevents or treats illness; abortion kills. Even if a woman is at risk of death due to a health condition during pregnancy or a pregnancy-related health issue, such as pre-eclampsia, taking the time to purposefully kill her preborn child is not going to do anything to save her life more than a preterm delivery or an emergency C-section would. It takes two to three days to carry out abortions in the second and third trimesters, but it takes under an hour to perform a C-section which could save both lives.
Terms no longer allowed in the pro-abortion script are “safer than carrying a pregnancy to term” and “difficult decision.” That’s because the truth is that there is no solid proof that abortion is safer than carrying to term. In addition, in order to be “pro-choice,” people are now expected to celebrate abortion as right and good — and to do that, the idea that a woman might struggle to make the decision to kill her preborn child must be brushed off. If abortion is good, it cannot be looked upon as “a difficult decision.”
“Abortion bans are restrictions and place unnecessary hurdles in the way of youth, BIPOC and low-income folks.”
Legalized abortion was born of the eugenics and birth control movement, established in order to reduce the populations of certain groups of people — including Black and underprivileged Americans. Arguing that it’s a negative to put restrictions in place because it will allow more people of color and more poor children to be born is helping to achieve the goals of eugenics.
In addition, the law places “hurdles” in the way of murdering most people — except when those individuals are preborn human beings. Abortion is an injustice, and every effort should be made to restore justice and the right to life for all human beings.
“People who get abortions”
Now removed from pro-abortion speech is the word “women,” to be replaced with phrases such as “person with a uterus,” and “pregnant people,” in the name of inclusion. And yet, in all of this inclusion, the humanity of preborn human beings is still denied.
As long as pro-abortion language ignores the fact that a living human being exists inside the mother’s womb during pregnancy and that this human being is killed, it will never be honest language.
