By Maria V. Gallagher, Legislative Director, Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation
Among the more curious terms advocates for legal abortion use to justify their position is “reproductive freedom.”
The phrase certainly has a ring to it—but that’s because it seems life affirming. “Freedom” is such an important word in the American lexicon, connotations that extend all the way back to securing independence from Great Britain. Indeed, our nation was founded on freedom, along with the rights to life and the pursuit of happiness.
“Reproductive” is also a pleasant word, signaling the means by which the next generation comes to be. It is a life-giving adjective, and it implies a hopeful state of affairs.
Combining the word “reproductive” with “freedom” would seem to indicate that one has the liberty to reproduce, to bear children. Nothing wrong with that.
But the abortion industry and its allies have co-opted the term to mean something quite different, something quite disturbing. In their mouths, it means the liberty to take the life of an innocent preborn child.
Abortion is not reproductive—it is lethal. It always involves the ending of a baby’s existence before he or she is born.
Early suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton understood that. They readily argued that abortion was a flagrant injustice. These early promoters of a woman’s right to vote saw abortion as not a mark of freedom, but a means of violence.
“Reproductive freedom” is, in essence, a code phrase for killing. It is typical of the pro-abortion double speak which treats a child as a mere “choice” and the denial of the rights of the preborn baby as an exercise of “women’s rights.”
Language is critical to the abortion debate. In trying to use agreeable-sounding words to camouflage killing, the abortion industry conceals the horror of abortion. But the disguise makes no difference in the end. For abortion is a tragedy which stops a beating heart—often the heart of a female who never gets the opportunity to celebrate her womanhood.