Abortion advocates have used a whole array of language games to cover over the medical fact that abortion kills a human child.
One method is to talk about the concrete facts in terms of vague abstractions. Don’t say you are for abortion, say you are “pro-choice.” Dehumanize the unborn child by using words like “product of conception” or “embryonic cells.” You can also shift attention away from the question at hand by saying you support not abortion but “women’s health.”
As George Orwell said in his classic treatment of how politicians and ideologues manipulate the language, “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
Abortion advocates are reportedly using a new slogan, one designed to conceal the horrible reality by packaging it with language that has a powerful positive connotation. The slogan, which may sound persuasive even to liberty-loving conservatives, is Abortion Is Freedom. Billboard are going up trumpeting that message. The sign shown at the link also reverses the terms, adding “Freedom Is Abortion.”
Discuss this new branding. What is this slogan trying to do? What audience is it trying to reach? What’s wrong with its underlying assumption?
Can we come up with some new anti-abortion slogans?
For example, “Abortion Is Child-Abuse.” That attaches the issue to something that is universally abhorred, just like “freedom” is universally venerated, while undoing the abstraction technique by “calling up mental pictures” of who is being harmed.
Can you think of others?
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