ANALYSIS – Most conservatives understand that one of the left’s major weapons in the war of ideas is manipulating language and using well-researched buzzwords and phrases to change reality and mask their more extreme ideas.
We see it every day with the constant use of ‘gun violence’ rather than shooting or murder committed by a criminal. We see it with ‘global warming’ becoming ‘climate change’ when the facts don’t support the narrative.
We also see it with the insanely deceptive and grotesque ‘gender-affirming care’ rather for genital-mutilating sex-change surgery.
And of course, we see it in spades with abortion, where supporting the unrestricted killing of unborn babies in the womb becomes ‘reproductive health care rights,’ previously known as being ‘pro-choice.’
The new term is far better politically since it appears to somehow be about rights and health, not deception and killing. Plus, ‘pro-choice’ has been thoroughly sullied by its accurate association with being ‘pro-abortion.’
And we can’t have that.
And now, since the Dobbs decision correctly returned the abortion issue to the states where it always belonged, the battle to control the language, and hence the narrative on abortion, is intensifying.
And it just got a lot worse.
The latest words and phrases chosen by the left to describe or refer to abortion fly in the face of fact and science.
But the leftist language warriors are now being reinforced by the power behind the news media – the Associated Press—and its widely used ‘Stylebook.’
The Daily Signal reports:
The Associated Press recently released a guide for news outlets for reporting on abortion that’s so biased in favor of the procedure, its guidance often runs contrary to medical science. The new guide has the ability to significantly distort how Americans perceive the abortion issue.
The AP’s “Abortion Topical Guide” is part of the widely used “AP Stylebook” that many outlets across the country, including The Daily Signal, use as a guide for everything from grammar to punctuation to best practices for terms and phrasing.
One glaring problem among many? The guide frequently cites the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to back up its guidance. ACOG claims to be the premier professional membership organization of OB-GYNs. But on the issue of abortion—a procedure that most OB-GYNs don’t perform—ACOG is wholly committed to lobbying for extreme abortion policies that don’t reflect its membership’s views.
In typical Orwellian fashion, the leftists at AP cudgel writers into referring to an unborn child’s “heartbeat,” which is detectable via ultrasound from the very early stages of life to the deliberately bland and mostly meaningless term “cardiac activity.”
The Stylebook also inappropriately enters the scientific realm as self-made medical experts when it advises writers not to refer to unborn children as “pain-capable” until after at least 24 weeks.
This, even though the beloved doctors who actually perform surgeries on ‘preemies,’ or premature babies in utero, regularly use anesthesia for those babies under 24 weeks because they feel pain.
The AP’s demonic advice also contradicts the massive, and growing, body of research showing unborn babies can feel pain at just 15 weeks or even earlier.
And most importantly, the Stylebook admonishes writers to never, ever use the accurate but uncomfortable phrase – ‘late-term abortion.’
Polls show a solid majority of Americans are opposed to late-term abortions, so best to religiously (pun intended) avoid the term.
The Daily Signal concludes:
The AP guide misses the mark throughout. Of course, that’s inevitable when the goal is not objective reporting of fact but rather promoting pro-abortion propaganda. Try as the AP might, it’s a fool’s errand to put lipstick on a pig.
I go further by saying AP is part of the left’s far-flung language-distorting media empire intended to manipulate words, in order to manipulate news, in order to manipulate you.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
