NEW FRAME FOR ABORTION DEBATE

Frank Luntz, a Republican hit-man who uses words as bullets, has been challenged by no other than cognitive linguist George Lakoff—it is about time. Luntz is a political strategist who concentrates on using “focus groups” to test reactions to words used in political debate.  It is virtually impossible to listen to Republican talking points without being in the dark shadow of this man. He has been able to frame the debates in a favorable way for the right wing point of view. He has stumbled upon the idea that he can drown logic with motion to sway opinion. For example, you never hear a republican say anything about abortion without evoking the words kill, murder, and baby. They never use biological correct terms for zygote, morula, blastula, implantation, fetus, and embryo. The term they always use is ‘baby’ invoking the image of a healthy chubby child with arms and legs flailing about. Women never ask a doctor for an abortion, they always ask and abortionist to “kill their baby”. For them abortion is framed as murder, the painful killing of an unborn child with malicious intent in the context of killing an innocent baby while it struggles and screams and not in the cold factual medical context of removing a cluster of cells from the uterus of a woman. In addition and for the same reason, all abortions are late term abortions. The social circumstances of rape, age, incest, poverty, quality of life are all subservient to emotion.

The solution seems to be that prochoice people need a word to shed much of this emotion. There always will be, and I, for one, hope there always will be emotion involved because pregnant women have to make serious and sometimes difficult decisions. The word I would propose is ‘conceptus’ or the plural ‘conspectuses’. A word found in medical dictionaries: “the sum of derivatives of a fertilized ovum at any stage of development from fertilization until birth, including the extra embryonic membranes as well as the embryo or fetus” (Dorland’s medical Dictionary, 27^th Ed.). I hear both prochoice liberals and prochoice conservatives stumbling badly trying to find words to avoid the emotional frame Frank Luntz has built for them. The word conceptus is my counter proposal. Perhaps, my proposal is not made as elegantly as George Lakoff would have done it but it is sincere.

Prochoice people will never be successful in avoiding the Luntz trap until they learn to use different words; words matter. A “conceptus” may live or may die. You may want it, love it, and cherish the circumstances of its existence or you may hate it or the circumstances surrounding its continuation, just as you abhor cancer cells in your body, but you do not kill or murder cancer. 

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