Yasmin Vossoughian of MSNBC recently hosted a panel discussion entitled, “Let’s Talk About Abortion Rights,” featuring Mini Timmaraju, President of NARAL; Emily Albrecht, Director of Education & Outreach at the Equal Rights Institute; and Dr. Kameelah Phillips, founder of Calla Women’s Health.
The semantics themselves were definitely the most fascinating – and ominous – aspect of the conversation. A careful consideration of the abortion advocates’ word choices – and their “correction” of the sole pro-lifer’s language – reveals much about their not-so-hidden agenda and the tactics they are using to achieve it.
Tactic one: Manufacturing meaning via phony phrases
Timmaraju began by referencing “a constitutional legal right” to abortion, even though the Supreme Court has already determined that such a thing does not exist. Indeed, even the title of the program referenced “abortion rights” – a non-entity. Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. No one has a right to engage in such behavior, no matter the circumstances.
But abortion advocates really want the American public to believe that such a right does exist, because practically everyone, especially the average American, opposes government interference with people’s free exercise of their rights. This is why they insist on using such terminology – in this case, quite literally.
Although Timmaraju used the phrase “pro-choice” just moments beforehand, when Albrecht used pro-choice/pro-life terminology, Vossoughian stepped in to correct her, telling her she would prefer that Albrecht use the terminology of “pro-abortion rights/anti-abortion rights.”
The reason for this is obvious: it paints a clear portrait of who the heroes and villains are supposed to be. After all, who wants to be anti-rights of any kind? Clearly the good guys in that paradigm are the pro-rights champions – at least, this is what abortion advocates want you to think.
Tactic two: Redefining reality by modifying existing terms
But Vossoughian’s stated reason for correcting Albrecht was something else entirely. She claimed she wanted Albrecht to use “rights” terminology rather than pro-choice/pro-life terminology “because I think everyone at this table is pro-life. We all advocate life.”
Which brings us to the second pro-abortion semantic tactic: redefining words and phrases. Here, Vossoughian blatantly attempts to co-opt and redefine the phrase “pro-life” to encompass the pro-abortion position, which actually advocates killing. So we are now supposed to accept a definition which directly contradicts what the term has always meant. After all, if abortion advocates are also pro-life, then nobody can really object to their position.
But this is not the only term abortion advocates would like to redefine. On a broad scale, they would like to redefine science. Timmaraju even acknowledges this openly: “We have two concepts of what science means, what definitions are.”
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “fetus” as “a young human being or animal before birth, after the organs have started to develop.” Similarly, Merriam-Webster defines “person” as a “human, individual.” It follows, then, that the fetus, being human, is a person – by the most basic of definitions, and indeed, by common and long-established English usage of those terms.
But that is not what abortion advocates want the public to believe. Phillips stated: “[W]e don’t think of [a fetus] as a full-formed ‘person’ the way people in this argument often use it.” In other words, they don’t think of a fetus as a person by the dictionary definition, but rather by their own definition, which has been custom-fabricated to serve their ideological purposes.
Similarly, they would like to redefine what a preborn heart and heartbeat are. Phillips said: “It’s not a heartbeat in the way that we think of our heartbeat, four chambers, valves, et cetera.”
So, since preborn humans look different than adults, it’s okay to kill them. This is the core of their argument. It is precisely this kind of “logic” that has been used to justify countless genocides and other atrocities throughout human history, and it is completely unacceptable.
Tactic three: Obscuring an agenda of killing by employing euphemisms
“We’ve actually shifted our language to talk about reproductive freedom,” Timmaraju stated. “It taps into a fundamental freedom to decide if, when, and how to have a family.”
Let’s be clear: what she is referring to is not reproductive freedom. It is not the “fundamental freedom to decide if, when, and how to have a family.” Everyone has that freedom – and we do not need to kill our children in order to exercise it. And yet, killing children is what Timmaraju is actually talking about. She is employing a euphemism to distract from the real issues.
And she essentially admits it: “At the end of the day,” she said, “if you look at this as a fundamental issue of freedom, it does sort of offset a lot of these biological debates.” In other words, the science of when life begins, whether a preborn child is a person, whether abortion is killing – none of that matters if killing certain humans is an issue of “freedom.”
READ: Abortion advocates change their terminology again… but the deception is the same
Abortion advocates are by no means the first to use euphemisms as a form of sleight-of-hand to disguise an atrocious agenda.
Josef Goebbels, the head of Adolf Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda, once said, “They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.” And the Nazis were particularly adept at using euphemisms to cloak murder: “Sonderbehandlung” (“special treatment”) meant execution, while “Endlösung” (“final solution”) referred to the planned genocide of the Jews. The mobile killing units sent into Eastern Europe during World War Two were “Einsatzgruppen” (“task forces”), and “Evakuierung” (“evacuation”) referred to the forced transfer of Jews from their homelands to death camps.
The truth is infinitely powerful
Saul Alinsky, hero of the far Left, stated in his infamous “Rules for Radicals”: “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Abortion advocates know this. That is why they play word games, and insist that everyone else follow their rules. They know they can control thought, and thus actions, if they can control the language.
Don’t play along. Speak truth, always, and fight the tyranny of phony phraseology. The battle to protect the preborn can begin just that simply: with a single honest word.
