…and how this type of negligence contributes to how people vote, to the detriment of our bodies.

Over at Women’s Media Center there is an article up by Gloria Feldt

The U.S. Supreme Court decision (Gonzales v. Carhart) upholding the federal abortion ban is the fruition of that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right

Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court’s majority, in addition to using the inaccurate term “partial birth abortion,” also referred to the “abortion doctor” repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as “doctors,” or “ob/gyns”? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to “tonsillectomy doctor” or “hysterectomy doctor”? Of course not. But those who want to take away entirely a woman’s human right to make her own childbearing decisions have used the term “abortion doctor” for so long as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to adopt their language.

Such bias is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle over what losing plaintiff Dr. Leroy Carhart has called “partial truth abortion.” There is no such thing as partial birth abortion. The term will be found in no medical book. It was coined in 1995 by Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right-to-Life Committee, and former Congressional representative and current Florida appeals court judge Charles Canady explicitly to confuse, horrify, and deceive—to manipulate language with the intent of sensationalizing the abortion debate.

Words are important. Words have the absolute power to sway thoughts and beliefs even with little or no facts to support them. It would stand to reason that journalists would understand this more than most people since their whole job is to expose the truth using words. One would imagine that a journalist’s words would be held to a higher standard and be required to be factual as opposed to inflammatory and just plain wrong. Silly me.

This is something that the Right, largely led by evangelicals, learned early. If you say something enough times and with enough conviction, eventually someone will believe you. But of course the evangelicals would know this best since that is really what keeps their particular brand of religion alive and kicking. They are raised on inflammatory language and fantastic untruths. So it is not shocking when groups like Right To Life use language like “embryo-killing,” “unborn child pain,” and “fetal homicide” to sway voters and subsequently politicians. On their website (I won’t be linking to it because I think it is offensive – but you can find it yourself) Right To Life offers an animated “medically accurate” illustration of what a “partial-birth” abortion looks like. I am going to go out on a limb and say that their illustration is not based on any medically accurate information that real doctors provide. Especially considering how factual the rest of the anti-choice information is.

These groups do not use facts to support their side or make their point. They use scare tactics and untruths to play on the emotions of whomever will listen.

I do not believe that Justice Anthony Kennedy however was particularly swayed by inflammatory terminology surrounding the abortion debate and stirred up by the media but I do believe that he used these words to support his position and add more fuel to the fire and support his backward ass views.

But for journalists to accept the rhetoric that the Right establishes as “fact” and thus use these terms to tell their stories, well, then they have given up their power to enlighten the public to any real story. By using what amounts to a celebrity gossip as journalism approach sensationalist and inflammatory writing has drifted naturally into the abortion debate.

Unfortunately, this type of negligence only contributes to the dissemination of the already tenuous hold that women have on the safety of our own lives.

Via AlterNet