I believe it was the English writer Aldous Huxley, author of the frightening novel regarding our possible future entitled “Brave New World”, who once wrote that if you change the language about something you can change the way people perceive it and respond to it. You can even change the reality of what you speak if you change the language. In this view, language used incorrectly can be a form of suppression of the Truth.
The Nazis brought this even further. They contended that if you say a lie often enough, it becomes a truth in people’s minds. As they spread lies about the Jews, saying them over and over again, the common person began to believe what was completely false.
Such a distortion and change of language is being foisted on us all by the media/academia/politico-complex regarding the issue of abortion. In a kind of collusion to obscure the truth of what an abortion truly is, what is foisted on the public are slogans: Reproductive rights, Women’s health, “My body my choice!” or doubly insulting “Keep your rosaries off our ovaries!”
Who can be against ‘Women’s health’? It seems a mean thing to be against ‘reproductive rights’! In the thought of Huxley: Big Brother is attempting to change the issue by changing the language. This is being reinforced in thousands of ways by the media that keep presenting things in the way which casts the opponents of abortion as small minded, unscientific, and cruel persons who would rather women go back to unsafe abortions that compromise their lives. They cast themselves as ‘progressives’ who are guarding the rights of women to have decision making authority over their own bodies.
But what is an abortion, really?
What happens in the womb normally is something that is so amazing that, if it weren’t so hidden, would be the greatest wonder of the world. From a few cells a new human being begins to be formed. The circulatory system, the nervous system, the many highly complex and specialized organs are all being created in so intricate a complexus that it defies the geniuses of the world to replicate. The heart begins to beat. The developing human being grows larger, begins to move and to feel pleasure and pain. Most astoundingly, the human brain begins to form and to take over many organisms and functions all in sync with the human being, the mother, and all her many nutritional and automatic support, in which the new human being is safely protected until it is ready to be born and to continue his or her life outside the womb. Even then, the body is not complete; left on its own would die within hours. A human being, once born, is still dependent on the mother for nutrition (breast feeding) that helps the skull to complete formation and for the extremities to grow and develop till the human being can walk on its own and can begin to master the highly complex and difficult art of using language to communicate.
For we who believe in God, this miraculous process leads to praise and thanksgiving. For atheists, there is only wonder and amazement at what ‘Nature’ can do.
Abortion, then, is the willful, violent killing of the human being during the phase of growth in the womb of his or her mother. The methods used are too horrible to put into words. Poison, crushing, dismemberment.
One has to have great compassion for women who find that they are pregnant and who are left by the man involved to deal with things by herself. Even the payment for the abortion is a cop-out from the responsibility already incurred. The father of the developing human child must provide for that child throughout the child’s growth to maturity. In addition, if the father is unwilling to help, he should be legally constrained to fulfill the obligation he has incurred by conceiving a new human life. And if the parents are unable to bear the financial burden of a new human life, then our country should provide the funding to bring that child to maturity.
This should also be the goal of religious institutions to put their money where their preaching is and help with a child’s growth and learning. This is where there is a truth in the feminist critique: often the woman is left with the burden of raising a child that she is not able to do. In a country that spends billions on weapons, could we not invest in a future American by assisting the woman in bringing her child into the world and to its growth?
Expensive? Yes. But in helping women, who often do not want to abort but feel that they have no ability to take care of the child, we as a country are setting up a prolife future for our nation.
Perhaps this may be the common ground we are looking for to begin to resolve this painful wound of our national psyche.
But in the meantime, let us call a spade, a spade.