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.
Five years of messaging since the manifesto appeared have been highly effective. In nine states and Washington, D.C., abortion is now legal through the full nine months of pregnancy. A late-term baby can be aborted in a hospital room while perinatologists nurture a baby of equal age in an adjacent room. The moral sense of many health-care professionals is incoherent and deadened. Journals of medical ethics have published articles entitled “All Abortions are Medically Necessary” and “Why We Should Stop Using the Term ‘Elective Abortion.'” Notable among the 2019 abortion manifesto’s signers is the American Medical Student Association.
In newscasts, op/ed pages, and political ads, “reproductive health care” has been constantly repeated. Desensitization has advanced to the point that demonstrators now hold signs overtly proclaiming, “ABORTION IS HEALTH CARE.” The enormous slogans posted on the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 come to mind: “WAR IS PEACE”; “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”; “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” Equating lethality with “care” is sheer nihilism, destroying the meaning of words and shattering moral order.
A well-known Orwell epigram is that restating the obvious is the most important task we face today. We must reiterate biological facts ignored by the elites. An unborn child is not a part of her mother’s body. She has a fully human, uniquely personal genome. From her earliest hours, she demonstrably is alive, metabolizing and organically developing, distinctly from her mother.
Another obvious truth that cries out for restating is that most abortions have nothing to do with “health.” According to a June article by Dr. James Studnicki of the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Dr. Ingrid Skop, roughly 95 percent of abortions involve a healthy mother and a healthy baby. Less than 1 percent involve rape or incest. The great majority are elective, grounded in life plans, relationship issues (with men often urging an abortion), or financial problems, not in any medical concerns.
Dobbs was a victory for the pro-life movement, but hard work lies ahead. Pro-life messaging must stress compassion, but it must also be concrete and truthful. It should focus on the generous work of three thousand pregnancy centers (which most Americans support), and on the radicality of laws removing all limits on abortion. The movement should also urge the Trump administration to be honest about abortion and hold it accountable when it buys into abstract abortion rhetoric. (Trump has stated, on Truth Social, that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”) It’s vital to resist the melting of reality into abstractions. Human life is uniquely precious. Pregnancy is not a disease. And destroying human life is not “health care.”
John D. Hagen Jr. is an attorney who has given pro bono support to crisis pregnancy centers.
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Image by James O'Keefe, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
