Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Part II

I guess I should have gone into more detail on my last erant, but at the time I was just trying to quickly fire off a little rant over a pet peeve of mine.

My good friend Josh decided to poke at me a bit in the comment section:

You too are using “dirty semantics propaganda” by suggesting that “pro-choice” is dishonest and that it should instead be called “pro-abortion”.

If you have a frank discussion with many people who are pro-choice, you would likely hear sentiments similar to what Rudy Giuliani recently expressed: that they are in fact, personally, against abortion – not pro-abortion, as you would like to call them. However, all things considered they do not believe in legislation that outlaws abortion. There are a myriad of reasons. Obviously, considering your rigid viewpoint, you’re not likely to agree with many of them, so I’ll spare you a list.

Let’s consider these facts:

Representative Kucinich is a strong supporter of the “pro-choice” position and is at the same time a man whom I admire and consider an intelligent and moral human being. So I think it’s hardly fair to call my anti-abortion views rigid if one means to suggest that they are not nuanced and informed from a consideration of both sides of the argument. Continue reading →

Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice

I often read the website ZNet. It is a great daily source of articles coming from a perspective that is critical of the media and the establishment. A lot of the content of the site reflects an anarchist viewpoint and promotes the idea of participatory economics. It’s a good site and I recommend it as a daily news stop along with Antiwar.com (which comes from a Libertarian party perspective but is nevertheless a great source of information).

Today, I was browsing ZNet when an article on abortion from the neo-liberal magazine The New Republic caught my eye. The article by Princeton feminist scholar Christine Stansell was entitled “A Lost History of Abortion”, and despite my better instincts, I clicked on the article and started to read it. That is until Ms. Stansell decided to play her hand and use language manipulation from almost the get-go. In the second paragraph, she refers to those who oppose abortions as “the anti-choice movement”.

And that just irritates me to the extreme. Continue reading →