Antonia Tully blogpost,

“Abortion kills babies” is a long-standing pro-life slogan. Now, it seems, the pro-abortion lobby wants to use the term “killing” too, because the “euphemistic, placatory, apologetic ‘pro-choice’ strategy” hasn’t worked, according to US pro-abortion feminist, Sophie Lewis, writing in The Nation.

Sophie wants the abortion lobby to be more open and proclaim, as does the title of her article: “Abortion involves killing – and that’s OK”. Well, half of Sophie’s slogan is right, abortion does involve killing. But it’s not ok, and it is chilling that this is the message that at least some pro-abortionists want to promote.

This is not the first time an abortion advocate has proclaimed that abortion is killing. Back in 1996,  Naomi Wolf sent shockwaves through the abortion rights movement, when she declared that “the death of a fetus is a real death” and to deny this was no less than “self-delusions, fibs and evasions”.

Yet Sophie herself writes about abortion using inaccurate, euphemistic language. She says, “Something is killed during a uterine evacuation, much as a flower dies when it is plucked.” No. It’s not “something”, it’s someone, a unique human being. And by effectively likening abortion to plucking a flower, she too is dodging the grim reality of abortion.

Women are not idiots

“We’re not idiots; we understand the stakes. Sometimes we choose death”, says Maggie Nelson, whom Sophie quotes in her recent article. Maggie is right. Women are not idiots.  Women know that abortion involves the death of their baby, that’s why they suffer so grievously afterwards.

For over five decades, SPUC has been educating the public about the development and humanity of unborn children. For over five decades we have been explaining what an abortion really is and promoting a loving alternative to women. 

We have never treated women as idiots. It is the abortion industry which does that; telling them, for example, that surgical abortion “[r]emoves the pregnancy by gentle suction”, when, in fact, the woman’s cervix is stretched open, a tube with sharp edges is inserted and her baby is dismembered so the parts are small enough to be sucked out. If the abortion industry did not sugar-coat its deadly practices, the bottom would drop out of its trade.

Abandoning women when they need help

The mantra of the abortion lobby, and one that Sophie trumpets, is that no one should have to be pregnant if they don’t want to be. That’s the only reason a woman should have to give to get an abortion. This sweeps away all the difficult circumstances surrounding an unplanned pregnancy and abandons women when they most need help. 

“Abortion involves killing – and that’s OK” is itself a somewhat euphemistic statement. It fails to acknowledge who is killed in the procedure. Use the word “baby”, and the reality becomes too ugly and unpalatable. Sophie will only go as far as referring to an unborn baby as a “proto person”; a term for which not even Google can come up with a definition. She also likens pregnancy to having a “foreign” organism in a woman’s body, perpetuating the notion that pregnancy is a disease and a baby is some sort of malignant growth. 

So, what do we take from the confused, contorted and misguided thinking in Sophie’s article?

Firstly, sadness. Sophie is deluding herself. Whichever way you frame abortion, when it happens, a baby is killed and a woman in hurt in some way.

Secondly, the rightness of the pro-life position. While the abortion lobby deals in lies and half-truths, we must continue to speak the whole truth, accurately and fearlessly. This is the only way to achieve justice for unborn babies.

Thirdly, we must be aware that the idea that killing unborn babies is ok is in the public arena. This is the moment to push back, with love and compassion, that killing unborn babies is never ok.