Abstracting Abortion
by by John D. Hagen Jr, First Things:
As the smoke clears from the election, it’s worth analyzing the barrage of abortion rhetoric that the Democrats employed. In speeches, ads, and reportage, Democrats projected a set of slogans that have been carefully and intentionally crafted over the past five years. In 2019, the abortion lobby issued a manifesto entitled “Blueprint for Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice.” Seventy-six groups endorsed the document, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Planned Parenthood. Its purpose was to change abortion messaging from “choice” to “reproductive health care.” In 2023, an updated blueprint was released, this time with more than one hundred endorsements.
The blueprint reflects George Orwell’s key insight in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”: propaganda depends upon abstraction. Abstract words are used “to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Thus, for example, “[d]efenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”
Orwell illuminates the bloodless abstractions used in the recent campaign. “Abortion” is a concrete term that calls up mental images of tiny human beings being destroyed. Democrats and the media preferred to speak of “reproductive rights” and “reproductive health care”—nebulous abstractions with no lethal import. The moral issue was suppressed.
“Care” is one of the vaguest words in the lexicon. It applies to feelings as well as to medical and palliative work. No word’s connotations are more benign. The word appears almost seven hundred times in the 2019 blueprint (sometimes twenty times on a single page).
In the 2023 blueprint, “care” again is used hundreds of times. The messaging is just as Orwell describes it, with flesh-and-blood realities vanishing into euphemistic jargon. A curtain is drawn across the moral status of unborn children and over the very fact of their existence.
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