Words mean things
Has there ever been more productive ground for Leftist linguistic manipulation than the abortion issue?
It’s always a red flag when accurate vocabulary becomes verboten. “Pro-Choice” is just one of many Orwellian phrases adopted by TPA (Team Pro-Abortion—M). There’s also “products of conception” for the physical remains of the dead fetus. National Public Radio, Wikipedia, and the New York Times say “abortion care” rather than “abortion,” trying to transform an ugly word into a pretty one by appending the suffix “care.” Kind of like “siphoning-the-brain-out-of-the skull care” or “dismemberment care.”
On NPR, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries ranted about wicked Republicans denying women “health care.” I don’t think Jeffries ever used the word “abortion.” Abortion: you must love it, but can’t see it, and you can’t say it. TPA even gets worked up about the word “abortionist,” insisting that “abortion provider” be used. The word “abortionist” is comparable to the phrase “final solution,” one doctor writes, apparently unaware of how revealing his comment is.
A human fetus is “a clump of cells.” And that is not the worst thing they call a human fetus. The Facebook page “Occupy Democrats” posted a meme that encourages viewers to conflate a human fetus with an animal fetus, as per the falsehoods circulated by influential Darwinist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel. Under this meme, a poster remarked that a human fetus is comparable to his “boogers,” that is, snot. Another post remarked, “Birthing babies is the emotional distraction to creating a Fascist country.” A Facebook friend holds a PhD in the hard sciences. On his page, one of his leftist friends compared a human fetus to “cancer.” I did not see my scientist friend object. Rather, he said, “Instead of referring to the embryo as a ‘clump of cells,’ given the demographics, it might be more accurate to say ‘future cartel enforcer,’ or ‘future STD-infected crack ho.'” He said this because low income black and Hispanic women are much more likely to get abortions.
In any case, if TPA’s chosen God – perhaps Oprah or Obama – came down from Heaven and announced to them in unambiguous language that a fetus is a human life, they would still be Pro-Abortion. They celebrate selfish power of the strong over the weak as the highest virtue, and vulnerability and dependence as crimes justifying capital punishment. A popular Facebook page makes just this argument. “It doesn’t matter whether a fetus is a human being or not…it doesn’t matter if we are talking about a fertilized egg, a baby, or a five year old.” We are stronger so we have the right to kill.
Another Facebook friend, someone who spends hours devoted to animal rescue, said that she believes in abortion up to and including infanticide of a born child. Killing is morally acceptable, she argued, if a child – a dependent human being – is unwanted by anyone who will meet the child’s needs.
Atheist and Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer concurs. Infants, “because they are not ‘persons,’ have no interest in staying alive, and it is only superstition that makes us think that killing them is intrinsically wrong…Infants with known disabilities … do not bring the same amount of happiness into the lives of their parents … the very fact that someone is disabled means that he or she will have an unhappier life … Singer argues that it should be legal for parents to decide to have their disabled infants killed up to 28 days after birth.”
The left, I was sure, was all about being kind. About championing the oppressed. About condemning selfishness, greed, exploitation. We were on the side of prisoners on death row, of striking workers, of the handicapped who needed government services. We were anti-fur and pro-vegan.
Why were we betraying the most vulnerable humans of all? Why were we championing a morality that privileged the selfish convenience of the powerful ignoring the very lives of the powerless?
My comrades’ dedication to the oppressed was nothing more than a theatrical production in service to a narrative. It was all sets, costumes, scripts. Yes, yes, the left will tell you that they champion the powerless. When they tell you that, they are exiting objective reality and entering the gauzy realm of fairytale storytelling. The left simply takes the costume, “The Victim,” and the other costume, “The Oppressor,” and assigns those costumes to serve political ends.
Thus, the woman choosing to abort the life inside her is draped in “The Victim” costume. She chose to have consensual sex, knowing full well that intercourse creates life. Who victimized her? Amerikkka, of course; who else? You had to ask??? An astounding meme now circulates. It insists that America forces women to get pregnant and have children. This meme from “Susan of Texas” has been shared thousands of times.
With the deft touch of a pickpocket, the left has transposed The Victim role from the life form that ends up dismembered in a petri dish – the fetus – to the woman choosing to terminate that life. The antagonist is not the fetus; the fetus is erased through euphemism. It’s a “clump of cells.” Rather, the antagonist is “misogyny,” “patriarchy,” or “The Catholic Church.” In objective reality, none of these made the choice for sexual intercourse that the woman made; in the leftist theatrical production they are all the mustache-twirling villains who control the poor, poor woman’s agency. They got her pregnant, not her own choices.
Follows, a detailed, step-by-step description of the abortion process that is so gruesome, so macabre, the horror of it would have to leave any decent, compassionate human being physically ill. A former Planned Parenthood director, Annette Lancaster, speaks of her experience of it in the bleakest terms:
She’d seen and dealt with sick and injured people, and witnessed surgeries. But nothing prepared her…’to actually see…the workers piecing the baby back together in a petri dish…I’ve seen many women break down and cry.'”
This is done to make sure no pieces of the slaughtered infant are left behind inside the woman to rot and cause a potentially life-threatening infection.
Lancaster said in an interview that she and her co-workers could not bring themselves to talk to outsiders about their grim tasks. Rather, they gathered with other abortionists and abused drugs and alcohol to cope “with the things that we did and the things that we saw.” After an “abortion day…we would say that we were having a staff meeting…we would get pretty intoxicated.” Even her children noted a change in Lancaster. She would refer to the women who came for abortions as “cows” and “cattle.” “We called the trashcan where we would put the aborted babies the ‘nursery.'” She underwent a “hardening of the heart”
Well my God in Heaven, I should think so, yeah. Unless one is a soulless, sadistic psychopath, how could it possibly be otherwise?
This lengthy, impassioned screed makes for some damned unpleasant reading. Nonetheless, it is an essential piece, maybe as important a one as I can remember seeing right offhand, and it covers a lot of ground. Of course and as usual, the very people who need to read it most…won’t.
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