America’s Abortion Blind Spot: How Liberals Convinced Americans to Ignore the Fetus

22.11.2024 06:15

Although Republicans won resounding political victories across the country this November, there is one area where conservatives consistently lost: abortion. Seven of 10 state-level pro-abortion laws passed — including in four states that Donald Trump won —and Florida’s pro-choice law only failed to pass because it fell just short of the 60 percent share of the vote required for passage. This raises the question: Why are conservatives losing the abortion argument in this country, even when they are winning in so many other areas?

No large-scale social phenomenon is caused by a single factor. However, one thing looms large in this explanatory window: Progressives have created a blind spot in increasingly large portions of the country about the reality of what an abortion is. Somehow, liberals have managed to disconnect one of the two central figures in an abortion — the fetus — from the narrative altogether. A generation of people has grown up thinking of abortion as a purely political issue without considering the most basic physical fact that defines it.

However a fetus is construed, there is no denying that it is alive — and that an abortion kills it. But liberals do not talk about it that way. A visit to Planned Parenthood’s information about abortions on its website is instructive. In this detailed description of abortion, there is no mention of the word “fetus” at all. Instead, the fetus is referred to like this: “[A] doctor or nurse uses medical instruments and gentle suction to take the pregnancy out of your uterus.” A fetus’ existence is reduced to literally nothing. You don’t kill a fetus — you take the pregnancy out of your uterus.

Because liberals have for so long controlled much of the educational system and methods of information distribution, this language has created a blind spot in the American populace. Abortion is your right, they say. Abortion is safe, they say. But what is it, medically speaking? Well, classrooms and social media have conspired to allow us to accept a massive medical procedure without talking in depth about what it is.

Liberals haven’t just tried to implicitly train the country to ignore the death of the fetus; they have actively tried to suppress people they disagree with on the subject. For example, here in western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh passed a law that explicitly targets the speech of conservative crisis pregnancy centers. (These laws are not unique to Pennsylvania. Kamala Harris infamously pursued similar initiatives against crisis pregnancy centers as attorney general in California.) Among other things, it warns that any statement released through any means cannot be used if it is “deceptive, whether by statement or omission, and that a limited services pregnancy center knows or reasonably should know to be deceptive.”

This is a shocking violation of free speech on two separate grounds. First, it is so broad that anything the excessively progressive city government of Pittsburgh considers “reasonable” can be prosecuted under the law. For example, one of the things that the progressive think tank the Alliance — on whose authority a lot of this argument rests — claims is “misinformation” is the idea that abstinence has positive benefits, explicitly singling out religious perspectives as a “vehicle for medical disinformation and ideological messaging.”

So now we are not allowed to say we think abstinence is a good idea?

Second, this censorship contains one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism (see my book Liberal Bullies for more details): Group-based asymmetry. Even if one grants that it is legal to suppress someone’s viewpoint as “misinformation,” why specifically pass a law to target crisis pregnancy centers? It is noteworthy that by the dangerous “omission” standard, most liberal groups would fail the test very clearly. Nowhere in the document from the Alliance trashing crisis pregnancy centers could I find a single description of what a fetus is, or what the medical procedure actually does to the fetus. This seems like an important omission. Do you imagine that liberal city governments will target pro-abortion groups for this omission of an obvious fact that seems quite relevant to the medical procedure?

I’m not holding my breath.

I care deeply about both the health and the freedoms of women. Contrary to common tropes from the Left, I do not want to take away certain rights without reasonable cause. Contrary to what some might assert, I have no ill will toward women who have had abortions. All I want for them is healing, love, and grace. But truth is not the enemy of grace; it is in fact its needed partner.

It’s time that we reclaimed that truth ground by unashamedly shining a light on the most undisputed fact about what an abortion does: It kills a fetus. All our national discussions about the issue must start and end with that fact, and we mustn’t let the country get away with pretending otherwise. No matter the attempted censorship, no matter the names they call us, we must work through argument and reason (presented with kindness and compassion) to remove this American blind spot.

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