Abstracting Abortion, by John D. Hagen Jr.

Devout Catholic Worker Fired for Not Getting COVID Shot Wins Over $12M in Religious Discrimination Suit, by Nicholas McEntyre

November 15, 2024

Image by James O'Keefe, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

By John D. Hagen Jr., First Things, Nov. 14, 2024

John D. Hagen Jr. is an attorney who has given pro bono support to crisis pregnancy centers.

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As the smoke clears from the election, it’s worth analyzing the barrage of abortion rhetoric that the Democrats employed. In speeches, ads, and reportage, Democrats projected a set of slogans that have been carefully and intentionally crafted over the past five years. In 2019, the abortion lobby issued a manifesto entitled “Blueprint for Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice.” Seventy-six groups endorsed the document, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Planned Parenthood. Its purpose was to change abortion messaging from “choice” to “reproductive health care.” In 2023, an updated blueprint was released, this time with more than one hundred endorsements.

The blueprint reflects George Orwell’s key insight in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”: propaganda depends upon abstraction. Abstract words are used “to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Thus, for example, “[d]efenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” ….

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