From my latest article for Religion News Service:
As I read the Democratic Party platform on abortion, I couldn’t help but wonder what George Orwell would have said.
In 1946, Orwell wrote a famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” that described political speech and writing as “largely the defense of the indefensible.”
“Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” he wrote. Politicians turn to strange phrases in order to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
The 2016 Democratic platform contains a number of these euphemisms that hide abortion in a haze of abstraction:
“Democrats are committed to protecting and advancing reproductive health, rights, and justice.”
The terms “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights” and “reproductive justice” are newer additions to abortion-rights ideology. They seek to counter the effect of “right to life” language, which is grounded in the Declaration of Independence and resonates with many Americans.
On the surface, who can be against “reproductive health,” if by that, we mean healthy reproductive experience? If “reproductive health” is another way of saying abortion on demand, then we should wonder why one would adopt that term. What exactly is wrong with or unhealthy about a woman who is pregnant?
Next comes “reproductive rights.”
Does this term mean that a woman has the right to reproduce? Thankfully, no one denies a woman that right today, although nearly a century ago, it was popular among progressive elites to promote compulsory sterilization of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce.
If “reproductive rights” does not refer to the right to reproduce, does it mean the right to not reproduce? I doubt anyone would quibble with that definition. No woman should be forced to engage in sexual relations against her will. And the majority of people with moral objections to birth control still maintain a woman’s freedom to obtain it. No, the reason “reproductive rights” is controversial is because the term means the right to end the life of the human who already exists in the womb.
