In September, the Ohio Supreme Court caused an uproar among pro-abortion activists when it allowed the term “unborn child” to remain in the summary of an upcoming ballot measure on abortion. Pro-abortion activists objected, stating the language was misleading, preferring instead to use the term “fetus.”
Why would they fight so ardently over that word? Because they know that the key to getting people to vote for abortion is to obscure that there’s a human being growing in the womb.
Abortion supporters systematically engage in linguistic tricks, misinformation and lies. And the animating principle of this campaign has always been the dehumanization of unborn children and their mothers. Indeed, the shifting of their terminology has been and always will be one of their most powerful tools.
The use of dehumanizing language to obscure the reality of abortion is a longstanding pattern among abortion activists. This is evident in the choice of words that pro-abortion activists try to force on society: positive-sounding terms like “bodily autonomy” (whose body, exactly?), medical-sounding terms like “termination,” and the frequent refusal to use terms like “baby” or “child.”
Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne defines dehumanization in a 2006 article for Personality and Social Psychology Review as “[t]he denial of full humanness to others.” He further explains that one of the most common tactics for dehumanizing a class or group of people is the “likening of people to animals.” Among the examples he lists is a comparison between parasites and insects. That “parasite” comparison should sound familiar. Referring to or comparing the unborn to parasites has been a common tactic of those who support the violence of abortion.
Another now-infamous case of dehumanizing science denial came in a 2022 article from The Guardian. This article claimed to show “what pregnancy actually looks in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.” The pictures included in the article, however, showed only residual tissue from the gestational sac that surrounds the child, shamelessly omitting to show the remains of the actual human child.
In August of this year, a pro-abortion Forbes articlecharged pro-lifers with the very linguistic misdirection abortion supporters routinely engage in. Amanda Seller, president of the U.S. branch of the pro-abortion group MSI International, accused pro-lifers of “anti-choice misinformation and misleading language” and “anti-choice lies.” Blissfully unaware of the irony, she went on to accuse them of falsely claiming babies in the womb have a heartbeat at six weeks, along with a string of other untruths. Other prominent news organizations have engaged in the same kind of projection.
Politicians like former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams know a lot about changing language to achieve a political aim. Just look at last year’s midterms, when she publicly claimed that the heartbeat countless mothers hear during their six-week ultrasounds isn’t real and was manufactured to control women. Not only is this science denial, but this is demonstrably false and clearly dehumanizing.
The press is quick to defend their pro-abortion heroes whenever they are called out on their untruths. They did so in Abrams’ case, suddenly arguing that doctors differed in their opinions or that “science” supported Abrams.
And it’s not only the child in the womb for which pro-abortion activists are changing science and language, but also their mothers. Just look at Planned Parenthood who have emphasized the “gendered language” of abortion, saying, “While it may be challenging to use language like ‘people who become pregnant’ as opposed to ‘pregnant women,’ it is a minor discomfort that nowhere near exceeds the benefits.” Even Vice President Kamala Harris used language that distanced a mother from child when she refused to say “mother” or “woman” but rather “people who are pregnant.”
Efforts by the press to control the abortion narrative by controlling the language have even extended to official language guides. For example, the 2022-2024 Associated Press Stylebook’s entry on “abortion” reads, “Use the modifiers anti-abortion or abortion-rights; don’t use pro-life, pro-choice or pro-abortion unless they are in quotes or proper names. Avoid abortionist, which connotes a person who performs clandestine abortions.”
These linguistic veils create the distance between mother and child that allows society to turn a blind eye to the injustice of abortion happening all over the world. The pro-abortion movement doesn’t want society to see what’s happening in their facilities or to realize the humanity of children in the womb. It interferes with their bottom line for women to know that they’re carrying a child and not just a clump of cells. We can’t let them get away with that.
The pro-life movement must reject and call out this dehumanizing practice and reinforce what has always been true and supported by science: A child in the womb is a human being.
Amanda Mansfield, J.D., is an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
