Last month Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said he was “100 per cent committed” to legislation allowing “safe access zones” around abortion-providing hospitals and hopes to have it in place before the summer.
This is an interesting twist in the evolution of the euphemisms employed by those in favour of access to abortion. What the Government and many media sources call “safe zones” are, in reality, “exclusion” or “censorship” zones. The very idea that a hospital carrying out a procedure to end an innocent life has to be surrounded by a “safe zone” is an affront not only to morality, but also to language.
Euphemism is critical to the promotion of abortion (itself a euphemism)
Society’s unquestioning acceptance of the euphemisms that have come to dominate all discourse on abortion means that I should not use the phrase “end an innocent life”. By any scientific analysis there is a “life” – a living, growing creature – and that life is unquestionably innocent. After the procedure, that life is no longer in being; it has been ended. But to express this basic truth is to put oneself beyond the Pale.
Euphemism is critical to the promotion of abortion (itself a euphemism). The pro-choice playbook, How to Talk about Abortion, is helpfully available for anyone to see on the International Planned Parenthood Federation website. It recommends language to avoid (and why) and what to use instead. Respectability is key; language that might stigmatise, upset or cause doubts is to be avoided at all costs. And so, “abortion” or “termination of pregnancy” is preferred to “killing a baby” or “ending a life”. The irony is that the guide implicitly recognises that these are synonyms.
The IPPF guide says: don’t say “baby”, say “foetus”. Those in favour of abortion rights say this is merely insistence on accurate terminology. While “foetus” is indeed the correct clinical term for young growing in the womb, the term applies to all mammals. So the correct term would be “human foetus” when we are talking about what ordinary people still call a “baby”. Curiously, however, the insistence on clinical nomenclature seems to apply only to human beings at the foetal stage of development. When was the last time you heard a programme or read an article referring to the elderly as “geriatrics” – though it too is the proper clinical term?
No ‘pro-life’
“Reproductive healthcare” is the preferred term for the procedure to “end a pregnancy”. It is “healthcare” to allow for a “voluntary interruption of pregnancy” (avoid “abort a child”) in the second or third trimester (avoid “late-term abortion”), or to provide “intact dilation and extraction” (avoid “partial birth abortion”). It is supporting women’s rights to allow for sex-selective abortion (avoid “female feticide” or, worse still, “aborting girls”). Do not allow those who are opposed to abortion to describe themselves as “pro-life”. Instead, refer to them as “anti-choice” or “anti-abortion”. And those in favour of abortion are always “pro-choice”, never “pro-abortion”.
Insistence on euphemism represses debate. Where the issue is whether an act is morally right or wrong, a sanitised discourse that prioritises not injuring feelings is insipid and childish. No one likes being told our actions were wrong; we may be offended by the allegation. But adults in a free society must be able to call things by their right names, even at the risk of causing offence.
The abortion industry tries to control language to eliminate all resistance to or distaste for the act
Imagine not being able to call the current acts of Russian aggression in Ukraine what they are. Imagine having to use euphemisms to describe the reality of a reign of terror. Regimes such as Putin’s control language to control thought, and ultimately people’s moral sense. The abortion industry tries to control language to eliminate all resistance to or distaste for the act. Instead, using the language of care and protection, they twist people’s thoughts – and ultimately their consciences and moral sensibilities – so that they actually come to believe that abortion is a caring response to pregnancy.
This results in a preposterous situation where it is denied that abortion is a cause of death. Abortion instead becomes a supportive, safe, simple healthcare procedure that saves lives.
Fragile method
The method is powerful, but also fragile. Why, if all this were true, should women be upset to hear their moral choices questioned? No one attending a hospital for an appendectomy would pay any mind to, or be deterred by, a group keeping vigil and praying to protect appendixes. Why should this “healthcare” choice be any different? It is different because asking simple questions and stating simple facts, using plain, unvarnished words, shatters the euphemistic illusion.
The IPPF guide tells us that the condition whereby some women suffer from post-abortion stress and grief is 'made up'
For the IPPF and those who support its censorious approach, blunt words that risk hurt feelings are a greater sin than sharp surgical instruments used to end a life.
And if a woman goes through with an abortion because the wall of euphemism surrounding her was never penetrated, only to come to regret her decision – never mind. The IPPF guide tells us that the condition whereby some women suffer from post-abortion stress and grief is “made up”.
So it is that the good people in government will continue with their project to protect us all from the scurrilous affront of groups assembling peaceably to pray in places where they might be seen. They will prohibit all talk that might cause upset – despite the fact that there is really nothing to be upset about when accessing “reproductive healthcare”. And we will finally have “safe zones” around hospitals in which – as we will be permitted to say – “pregnant people” may freely avail of “abortion care” for their “foetuses”.