Some time in the next few weeks, my wife is planning to have her pregnancy terminated.
Now, lest anyone be scandalized that a Pro-Life Action League employee would say such a thing, let me clarify:
My wife, Jocelyn, and I are expecting our 6th child. As of this Friday, she will be 39 weeks pregnant.
And, as babies growing and developing in the womb have a tendency of doing, our baby will, some time soon, be born. After this happens, suffice it to say, my wife will no longer be pregnant.
Thus, her pregnancy will have been terminated.
Rhetorical Fraud
This occurred to me as I read a recent post by Life Dynamics’ Mark Crutcher, who wrote about the “rhetorical fraud” used by pro-choicers in which the term “pregnancy termination” is used as a euphemism for “abortion”:
The pro-life movement is not now, has never been, and will never be, opposed to pregnancy terminations. We are fully aware that all pregnancies terminate.
Remember this the next time you’re in a conversation about abortion with someone who uses the non-specific and vague phrase “termination of pregnancy” — especially if your interlocutor says this is something to which he or she is “personally opposed.”
Of course, “pregnancy termination” isn’t the only euphemism pro-choicers like to use in reference to abortion. Two other popular ones are “emptying the uterus” (to describe the abortion itself) and “gentle suction” (to describe how the uterus is to be “emptied”), both of which Planned Parenthood uses in this whitewashed tomb of a video:
It doesn’t take much grey matter to figure out why Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocates use this sort of phraseology. If you’re trying to sell women on the idea that abortion is no big deal, you’re obviously going to try to make it sound as agreeable as possible.
But take a look at a medical illustration of a first trimester abortion, and a picture of an actual product of conception pregnancy tissue baby killed by one, and ask yourself if the suction necessary to do that could properly be considered “gentle”.
“I Had No Idea What Abortion Was…”
The video above is emblematic of what the abortion industry wants the general public to know about abortion. They want people to know that abortion is a procedure a pregnant woman has in order to make herself “un-pregnant”, so to speak. But as for connecting the dots on how exactly that happens, they would prefer to keep us fuzzy on the details.
Through my job as director of the League’s youth outreach, Generations for Life, I often have the opportunity to speak to teenagers about abortion. One of the points I often make is that a lot of people, regardless of their age or education level, are clueless about the most basic facts about what happens to a baby during an abortion.
How else, after all, can one explain the gobsmacked reaction so many people have when they happen upon the graphic abortion pictures at one of our “Face the Truth” demonstrations, where comments along the lines of, “I had no idea what abortion was until I saw these signs” are par for the course?
[Cross-posted at Generations for Life]
