The ultimate human rights abuse of abortion continues to beget the abuse of language and technology. And that’s exactly what NARAL Pro-Choice America’s sister organization, the National Institutes for Reproductive Health (NIR), has done in creating a Google Chrome extension that transforms every instance of the phrase, “pro-life” into “anti-choice.”
The minds behind the extension know that words have meaning. According to neuroscience, words elicit images in the minds of hearers and readers. Modern technology has allowed researchers to pinpoint the exact portions of the brain responsible for this image-eliciting phenomenon: the “visual word form area,” which is located behind the left ear on the surface of the brain.
Abortion activists are keenly aware of this reality, and the war of words has long been a hallmark of their movement. Peddling anti-science terms like, “clumps of cells” and “products of conception,” they wielded significant power over the mental association many people made between words and reality where abortion was concerned.
Indeed, until recently, we faced the challenge of contending with the hidden nature of preborn Life: tucked away in a womb, images of the preborn were not readily associated with the words that describe them. But then came ultrasounds, photographs of prenatal surgeries (like this historic photo of baby Samuel reaching out of his mother’s womb and wrapping his hand tightly around his surgeon’s finger), and 3-D models of babies in the womb. Finally, the tiny humans to whom the Pro-Life movement gives voice held their own on the battleground of anti-Life sophistry.
The term “anti-choice” is both inaccurate and desperate.
The extension, which eradicates the term “pro-life” from the Internet for users, can be downloaded from Google’s Chrome web store. Instead of reading cohesive information on the abortion debate, extension users will see disjointed insertions of “anti-choice” across the web. The 2016 March for Life theme, for example, appears as “Pro-Woman and Anti-Choice Go Hand-in-Hand.” This is not only ridiculous, but also inaccurate.
Pro-Lifers are not anti-choice. We advocate for all of the choices that don’t involve killing people: open adoption, closed adoption, single parenting, co-parenting, etc. Abortion advocates, on the other hand, single-mindedly advocate a choice that renders one person dead, ravaging his or her ability to ever choose anything, and burdens the other person with the weight of that choice for the rest of her life.
Nevertheless, abortion activists cling to rhetoric with the knowledge that separating words from their meaning is their only hope of staying relevant. That’s why Planned Parenthood tells women that abortion “empties the contents of their uterus,” instead of owning the truth that abortion dismembers a living child. That’s also why abortion zealots even eschew the “A” word in favor of terms like “termination of pregnancy,” even though live birth is also a “termination of pregnancy.”
The truth hurts.
Creators of the internet-altering Chrome tool purport being “tired of seeing” the term “pro-life.” This is understandable – crusading for the destruction of human Life must be exhausting, especially since they are wildly outnumbered by Pro-Life activists. But turning off the truth in the face of opposition is lazy, and proves that abortion activists are throwing up their hands in the face of an exploding Pro-Life generation. The bottom line is that their bag of tricks is almost empty.