Hello
again. First, before I get to today’s topic, an update is in order. The bad
news is that I haven’t been invited to any further interviews. I’ve received a
couple of reject letters, and to be fair, one of them was of the, “we’re
keeping your file open,” variety, so perhaps it doesn’t count as a total
rejection. This is nothing unusual. One particular school’s pass stung, because
it was a position that everyone I know, including me, really wanted to see me
get, but that’s normal. In fact it’s quite normal for someone in my position.
That doesn’t make reject letters any more fun and it doesn’t make waiting any
easier. As my advisor pointed out, only academic searches can get away with the
amount of wait time they put people through. The good news is that more
positions continue to come out. Right now they’re of the one-year visiting
lecturer or visiting professor variety—the idea being that you stay there for
one to three years and move on—and I’m applying to five positions as we speak.
Meanwhile, I’m putting out appropriate feelers in other areas, but we’ll see. I
can only continue applying, continue working on my dissertation, and continue
trying to think positively. While I’m not a pessimist at heart, that isn’t
always easy to do. Some Christians seem to find it very easy to pull out those
scriptures about God’s good plans for you and use them when they’re troubled,
and the result is a serine individual even when everything’s gone completely
wrong. Those people are rare, and admittedly,
I am not as yet one such person. I pull out those same scriptures, I remind myself
of their truth, and I tell myself to knock it off with being anxious. Still, I
repeat that I am not a pessimist by nature, and things will work out somehow.
More accurately, things will work out as God means them too. Now on to today’s
topic.
Abortion is
a topic I’ve tackled before as you may know. I have posted a series of items on
the topic under the title “The Language of Abortion.”
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
In the series I examine the language we use when talking
about abortion e.g. words and shades of meaning we use as a culture when
seeking to promote abortion. In part III, I shifted to talking about the
growing consistency in the language of those who advocate abortion. In that
essay, I talked about several cases, the wrongful birth angle and two legal
cases that came out of it, and the case of Emily Rapp, who wrote an article in
defense of abortion given her son’s Tay-Sachs Disease. In all of those cases, I
was talking about what I might call post hoc abortion rhetoric. These people,
the Estrada family being the exception because they don’t appear to have ever
wanted abortions, talk about the abortions they might have had if only they’d
known. In other words, these are the abortions they would have had in light of
birth defects. The rhetorical situation, however, is worsening, and so I’ve
decided to speak up again concerning our growing, and shocking, consistency in
our views about abortion.
What do I
mean when I say the situation is worsening? I simply mean this: some are starting to set aside euphemistic
labels such as ‘termination’ and ‘tissue,’ and even outside of notions of
wrongful birth and genetics testing screw ups, there are folks passionately arguing
that, yes, the baby is definitely alive, and that, yes, the mother definitely
has the right to decide if it lives or dies. They argue that not all life is,
in fact, created equal, and that mothers should be left alone to make the
decision about this medical procedure and life choice for herself. At least
they’re setting the euphemisms aside, though now that they have, the
conversation changes direction.
Two things
recently grabbed my attention. One is an article in the online news venue
Salon.com. The writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, passionately defends the very point
of view I’m talking about. Since I will be referring to this article heavily,
here it is:
Please also watch the Planned Parenthood video that’s on
that page, because I’ll be discussing it as well. So to get straight into it.
Williams’ title is, “So What If Abortion Ends Life?” There are two ways to
interpret the intended meaning of this title. Rhetorically, she might have
meant, “So, what if abortion really does end life? We need to rethink abortion
in the light of the fact that these fetuses are living babies and stop the
practice,” or she might have meant, “Abortion ends life. So? It’s my right and I’m
going to do it anyway if I choose.” The fact that I am (A), writing this post
at all, and (B), choosing to discuss her article in it, should lead you to
conclude without having read the article that the second interpretation is the author’s
intended one.
Let me make
a couple points about Williams’ article before getting into specifics. First,
it is a polemic, an attack piece. Her language is fiery and sometimes
colorfully exaggerated. In my discussions, I am going to ignore that aspect of
it and delve into the meat of the article, the point she was making beyond all
the heated rhetoric. Second, there are a couple of points that she and I agree
on. She says it’s time to stop quibbling over whether or not a fetus is alive
and to acknowledge that they are living. We need to stop using euphemisms to
evade the question of life. I wholeheartedly agree.
Williams
begins her discussion by claiming that it was unfair and misleading for those
of us who oppose abortion to put it in terms of life versus choice, because we
force the other side to come out somehow opposing the notion of life. She
claims that we, those of us who are anti-abortion, in standing on the platform
of “it’s a life,” somehow deprive her side of equally semantically powerful
choices. SO, she claims, she and those who think as she does have been stuck
using less charged words: women’s
rights, reproductive freedom, etc. In other words, we who believe that abortion
is wrong have somehow unfairly stolen the semantics show by capitalizing on
word such as ‘life’ and ‘alive,’ and in Williams’ opinion, we wrongfully force
her side to debate the matter on a life versus choice basis, “… it’s pretty
silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses
aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re
intended to be born.” On that, she’s absolutely right. As to the rest,
it’s an interesting argument. Her discussion of semantics is fairly accurate as
far as it goes; ‘life’ is a more attention-grabbing word—in linguistic terms it
primes more--than ‘reproductive freedom.’ Yet, have we stolen the show, or have
we been discussing it correctly? Well, since Williams is willing to admit that
we are talking about living human beings, we can leave that last question aside
and go on. Williams and I agree. Fetuses are living human beings.
Mary
Williams and I differ sharply, however, once we pass that point of agreement.
She goes on to argue that unborn children are ‘non-autonomous entities,’ and that
the mother’s rights automatically supersede those of the baby. It is a baby,
Williams acknowledges, but it has no rights that the mother need concern
herself with: “a fetus can be a human
life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides.
She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health
should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of
her.”
Once I got over my own stunned shock at reading that, I
asked myself, has this person fully considered the ramifications of what she’s
saying? Let me spell out some of those ramifications and flesh her argument out
to one of its logical conclusions, and please keep in mind I’m speaking in
purely hypothetical terms. Supposing we somehow came up with a law allowing for
the forced euthanasia of the severely mentally challenged. We could rationalize
it with all sorts of utilitarian arguments about their “drain on society” and
all sorts of humanitarian arguments about their “quality of life,” and so this
law gets passed. Then, when this hypothetical law is in place and the people
are dying, we acknowledge that what we’re doing is killing people. Our defense
is that they don’t have any rights, or certainly far fewer than we do, that we,
those with mental competence, are making the decisions and we have the right to
make those decisions because we’re the ones who have to decide what to do with
these mentally retarded people, these ‘non-autonomous entities,’ to use
Williams’ phrasing. In fact, why confine it to the mentally challenged? Why not
the physically disabled too? Supposing my parents would have had the legal
right to euthanize i.e. kill me if I’d become too much to handle. Sound
familiar? If you’re thinking Nazi Germany, then we’re on the same page.
Ok,
back to reality. We don’t have laws like that and my parents would never have
done so anyhow. Yet, isn’t this line of thinking just what Williams employs to
advocate the right of the mother to kill the unborn baby? The question isn’t
why would she expand this line of argument to other populations besides the
unborn, but rather, why wouldn’t she? It is a logical next step, and it’s not a
very far step at that. It’s the sort of thinking (whether applied to the unborn
or to anyone else) that could make you lose sleep at night. It should. Lest you
think I’m exaggerating or overinflating her case, consider Williams’ closing
words: “I would put the life of a mother
over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to
acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth
sacrificing.”
If
that article was all I had to go on, this blog post would not have been
written. I could have dismissed Williams as the lone voice of lunacy. Yet
Williams refers her readers to a Planned Parenthood video on the page. The
video is called “Moving Beyond Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Labels, You’re Not in
Her Shoes.” It’s not a long video. Take a moment to watch it. You can also find
it at www.notinhershoes.org.
The
video, a promo from Planned Parenthood, urges viewers to stop thinking about
labels such as pro-life or pro-choice. It argues that those labels box us in
and confine the abortion discussion, oversimplifying it. Finally, it contends
that abortion is a “personal medical decision,” something on par with a mammogram
or a cancer treatment. We are urged to think of the woman in her personal
circumstances and to be more empathetic and compassionate.
That
last bit rather strongly implies that you can’t be empathetic, caring and
compassionate if you oppose abortions. It’s a neat rhetorical trick, actually,
because anyone on my side of the conversation who takes that video seriously
now has to justify our beliefs and demonstrate how compassionate we truly are
and how our compassion is not diminished by the fact that we happen to oppose
the killing of an unborn child. Remember, according to Mary Williams, that’s
exactly what we should be calling the “fetal tissue,” and unborn child. So, the
fact that we only want that baby to live somehow makes us coldhearted?
I
realize that Mary Elizabeth Williams likely doesn’t speak for many people even
on the pro-abortion side of the debate. Yet the fact that her article was
published by an organization that sees itself as a reputable independent news
venue is telling. More importantly, Planned Parenthood’s video reaffirms those
sentiments. So, do labels like pro-life and pro-choice confine us? As a
linguist, I am here to tell you that we can go round and round on that one. It
would be more profitable to ask whether those labels and their various versions,
pro-abortion, pro-choice, anti-abortion, pro-life, etc. et al really do portray
the situation inaccurately. If they do, and if those of us who oppose abortions
have been dangling red herrings in front of the public for forty years, then the
game would be up. In fact, if that is what anti-abortion folks like me had been
doing, we would have been busted and debunked about thirty years ago, maybe
twenty.
The
fact, and here I speak of the fact of language and linguistics, is that the
debate we have been having has been expressed in the most accurate terminology
the English language can provide. If you are anti-abortion, you are de facto
against abortions. If abortion means the ending of a fetus, and if a fetus is
alive, then abortion means the ending of something that is alive. What more do
we want here? No, my friends. No. The reason that Planned Parenthood and people
like Mary Williams want us to dispense with our terminology and its
accompanying framework isn’t because our words are inaccurate and our
conceptualizations baseless or unjust. It is because our terminology is highly
semantically accurate, and our frameworks for the last four decades have been
right on point. Dancing around the semantics of the words we use or lying to
patients about fetal development, as Planned Parenthood counselors have been
caught doing several times in Indiana and Wisconsin, won’t change any of that.
“A person may think their own ways are right,
but the Lord weighs the heart. To do what is right and just
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:2-3, NIV).
but the Lord weighs the heart. To do what is right and just
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:2-3, NIV).
