On the Semantics of the Abortion Debate

Please note that I'm referring not to the semantics of abortion, but specifically of the debate.

For just a couple weeks ago, a colleague at SLCC overheard me mention the mere categories of "Pro-Choice," "Pro-Life," offhandedly, without even making a value judgment--I was merely talking with a friend about how one can always tell the stance of a person by the words one chooses.

As if to inadvertently drive my point home, this colleague, apropos of nothing, approached me and went off on this spiel about how "Pro-Life" is an inherently misleading label, for it implies that "Pro-Choice" is pro-death or forces abortion or something, that "Pro-Choice" in fact stands for defending a woman's right to choose when and whether to be pregnant, and therefore "Pro-Life" should be more accurately described as "Anti-Choice," and a bunch of other things I'd already heard before.

I learned on my mission the futility of arguing with a person who's made up one's mind, so I just bit my lip and nodded till she stopped.

I forgot about the incident until just the other day, when at much-more-conservative LDSBC, I once again found myself mentioning the categories of"Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice" as examples of the difficulty of being truly objective in language; when again, apropos of nothing, a student went off on a spiel on how she believed that the term "Pro-Choice" is inherently misleading, that it should more accurately described as "Pro-Death," for by allowing abortions this lobby is in fact allowing for infanticide and legalized murder and death, and a bunch of other things I'd already heard before.

This time, though, I did speak up, telling this student about my SLCC colleague's similar argument; what I found so fascinating, I told her, was that both she and this Pro-Choice colleague were making such semantic arguments about abortion!  Not only that, they were making the same semantic argument, namely that the debate should be reframed so as to deny intelligibility to their opponents.  The morality of their positions were rooted less in ethics than in wording. 

That is, these two women, on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, were nonetheless arguing in the exact same way!  Their opinions were opposed, but they sounded the same!

Cause I'll say this about the way both argued: I was never for firmly Pro-Life than when my SLCC colleague interrupted my conversation, and I was never closer to turning Pro-Choice than when my LDSBC student interrupted my class.

Please don't misunderstand me: the abortion debate is literally a life-or-death debate, and a debate worth having, but we are selling the debate short when we reduce it to arguing wording.  Quibbling about semantics serves no one.

For in case you were wondering, I hold closest on abortion to David Foster Wallace, who said that when there is doubt about when exactly life begins or what qualifies as life, that it is better to error on the side of not killing it, all the while acknowledging that I'm a male who will never have to endure the pains of childbirth, and that this debate is far more complex than either side gives it credit for.

My Mom, for example, struggled with infertility for 8 years before having me, so she found voluntary pregnancy termination to be not only reprehensible, but personally offensive; yet also, when I've learned a friend was raped, I'd be lying if I didn't say my first thought was, "If she was impregnated, I hope she aborts."

Just FYI, rape-exceptions are part of the official stance of the LDS Church concerning abortion, wherein abortion is permissible in cases "of rape, incest, and where the health of the mother is in danger."  Note that that is the health of the mother, not just the life--the woman doesn't have to be dying for her precarious-health to warrant termination of pregnancy.  But how bad, then, does her health have to be?  I might say one thing now, but another when it's my wife on the operating table.  As with so many things, the debate is complicated, not clarified, by this position.

This stance puts the LDS Church to the right of, say, Planned Parenthood, but also puts us just to the left of Pro-Life hardliners (*cough* Todd Akin, etc *cough*), particularly the ones protesting General Conference every 6 months with signs saying "Abortion is Murder!" which just confuses the heck out of most Mormons.  "But we're Pro-Life, too!" we laugh, not understanding that the problem is that to them, we're not Pro-Life enough.

That is, there is a range of stances in the abortion debate, a range that is ignored by this quibbling, binary semantics argument.

Nor is the LDS Church's stance some late-period concession: once, I stumbled across the 1962 Encyclopedia of the American Psychology Association.  Out of sheer mindless curiosity, I looked up  abortion.  According to the APA in 1962 (barely a decade before Roe v. Wade), a woman desiring abortion was considered a deviant mental aberration; but they did, however, cite exceptions such as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," which scandalously permitted abortions in cases of rape and incest.  Again, as with so many things, a stance that was radical 50 years ago is considered conservative today.

And indeed, most Pro-Lifers I know are uncomfortable with a straight ban on abortions, including in cases of rape; just as most Pro-Choicers I know get queasy with permitting late-term abortions, even in cases of rape.  This is where the simplistic Pro-Life/Pro-Choice binary breaks down, and the difficulties begin.

But this is also where the conversation can really begin--or at least continue--of what are exceptions and what are not, of when and where is that messy line when abortion becomes morally objectionable, and in which circumstances; this is where the two sides can recognize that our senses of morality perhaps aren't quite so different or incompatible (heaven knows their semantic arguments aren't so different), where we can quit talking at each other and instead talk with each other.

But we will never get there if we keep on this forsaken quibbling about semantics.  We are not mere words.