Unfortunately, the lead up to election day 2024 south of the border saw the use of euphemisms and double speak grow exponentially.
It is worth noting that, as Jonathon Van Maren has capably written, one aspect of the Kamala Harris campaign was the outright celebration of abortion. However, it’s impossible to actually celebrate abortion if you talk about it any detail.
So celebrating abortion dovetails with the growing use of euphemisms. The more we obscure what abortion is, how it works and what it does, the more people can forget what we are talking about.
Thus, the current spin, while troubling, is perhaps unsurprising. And the spin is this: calling any aspect of reproductive care “abortion.”
Three examples will make the point. The first is a Kamala Harris ad where we learn the sad story of a mom who miscarries at 16 weeks. The ad tells us: “Because Donald Trump killed Roe v. Wade, Ondrea was denied standard medical care to prevent infection. An abortion.”
We already know she miscarried—but the medical care we are told she needs is called an abortion.
The second example involves a woman asking Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire what abortion is. When he defines abortion correctly, she asks him why he defines abortion that way, going on to say she includes even C-sections in her definition.
The third example involves a woman posting recently on LinkedIn about her miscarriage at eight weeks gestation. She goes on to write: “Did I wait for my body to try and pass the fetus knowing how traumatizing it would be to have to gather the remains of my could have been baby for testing? Did I wait for days to access a D&C with my OBGYN all the while in unmanageable pain? Only one answer emerged before us in the aftermath of this tragedy - we needed an abortion.”
She lost her baby already, but she needed an abortion, said with a straight face.
The post ends with a call to get out the vote for Harris. The personal is, as they say, political.
American demographer and Cardus Senior Fellow Lyman Stone explains the genesis of this particular problem. “Its origin is stupidly simple. The medical term for any prematurely ended pregnancy in the standard medical codes all hospitals and medical schools use is ‘completed abortion.’ And the procedural codes used to treat miscarriage, like D&C, are internally coded as subsets of ‘abortion.’ …The liberal doctors are getting mad we ‘banned abortion’ and acting like we banned a set of medical procedures and codes when in fact we banned a specific act of intentionally ending otherwise healthy fetal life for reasons other than the safety of the mother.”
I wrote one line under the LinkedIn post—a line I regret not for what I said, but how I said it. I wrote: “A d and c after a miscarriage is not an abortion.”
I should have connected first with the fact that this woman’s baby died. But something lost on those misusing terms is that her post perpetuates pain by pretending women have no agency. And that’s true where there is no difference between miscarriage and abortion.
The resulting comments to my one line came in quickly. I’m callous, useless, shame on me, etc. But of note was the charge that I am uninformed.
Online “misinformation” just got harder to adjudicate.
It doesn’t matter how much you celebrate abortion openly, or how much you cover it up in terms that make little sense. Most women, whether they support or oppose abortion, are smarter than that.
So where “pro-choicers” appear to win, aided by a complicit and one-sided media, they do so only through confusion and obfuscation. They can only truly win when every single last mother agrees that abortion is inherently neutral. This being impossible means while definitive action can (and is) be taken to limit free speech and even freedom of thought about abortion (witness those charged with silent prayer around clinics in the UK, victory will simply never be complete for those on the extreme edge of support for abortion.
Andrea Mrozek is Senior Fellow with Cardus Family.