Let’s start using different language to talk about reproductive rights.
person [pur-suh n] noun. a human being, whether an adult or child.
Language evolves. New words that describe change or innovation are often born from necessity. All of those self-portraits taken with your front facing cameras? “Selfies.” A pithy take on a current event sent to the world via your mobile phone? A “tweet.” But sometimes language is perverted – diverted from its source to alternate and unnatural destinations like a dammed river – and used to entrench bias instead of communicate objective fact. In articles and books, language manipulation is a relatively contained disease – only infecting those who have been directly exposed – but in the law, it can breed an epidemic.
The best example of a vocabulary that has been manipulated to the point of nonsensicality is the language surrounding reproductive rights. Riddled with linguistic oddities and oxymorons, the language that we use to talk about what happens in a woman’s body when she’s pregnant has little to do with the observable world – little to do with the rules of science, physics and biology – and more to do with pushing a political agenda or fortifying a religious belief. Alabama’s recently passed Human Life Protection Act is far from the only offender in this context, but it is the most egregious.
The moral failings of this legislation (outlawing abortion for the victims of rape and the child victims of incest) threaten both patience and inner peace, so let’s stick to the language. I take particular umbrage with two terms in this legislation.
First, the legislation uses the term “unborn life” to describe a fetus at any stage of liability. This isn’t the first time this term has been tossed around, but this is one of the most important times. Let’s take a closer look at the term “unborn life” and why, both on their own and together, these words are emblematic of the limitations of the vocabulary we currently use to talk about reproductive rights.
Most dictionaries contain multiple entries for the word “life”, ranging from the biological to the celestial. Life is both “the animate existence” and a “principle of existence conceived of as belonging to the soul.” So, life is both something that we can see, and something that we can believe in. These definitions make sense, of course: our language evolved not only to describe a world that made sense, but to describe a world as we sensed it, thus definitions that pit fact against faith must often reach some sort of compromise. The six to eight definitions that pop up to define the word “life” are the perfect example of such a compromise and why dictionaries – the place we go to figure stuff out, not make stuff more confusing – are not reliable sources in the instant context.
“Unborn” is similarly confusing. Most dictionaries use the following definitions: (1) Not yet born; yet to come; future (2) Not yet delivered; still existing in the mother’s womb; (3) Existing without birth or beginning. I find the last definition to be the most confusing and/or fascinating. Without birth or beginning? Surely everything must begin somewhere? Are my ova “unborn”? What about my partner’s spermatozoon? How much “unborn” blood is on our hands?
The second bone I’ll pick will take much less time. The statute does allow abortion when medical professionals agree that the child will be born with a “lethal anomaly.” The statute’s definition of this term as “a condition from which an unborn child would die after birth” begs the question of which of us has been spared this particular anomaly?
The reason debates deadlock in the context of reproductive rights is because the language that we currently use to talk about pregnancy is unusable. We need words rooted in fact, not faith. Words that fortify a woman’s right to autonomy, and her freedom to make decision about a part of her body, housed in her body and reliant on its holistic function to provide calories, oxygen and water, just like a kidney, a stomach, or a heart. A sugar addicted woman with poorly managed type two diabetes would not be charged with the murder of her kidneys. A man stuck for hours between rocks can’t be charged with the death of the arm he was forced to amputate and leave in the crevasse in order to survive (even though he’s the one who decided to go on the hike in the first place).
There are multiple sides to this debate, and I understand where everyone is coming from. But, regardless of what side we’re on, we can’t use language that doesn’t appropriately label what it is we’re debating in the first place. To say a fetus is an “unborn life” is the same as saying that I am a “born life” – we would all agree that the latter is a linguistic anomaly, but some of us would say that the former is an accurate description. Sometimes language ties our tongues and our hands.