Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Rhetoric





What Pro-Choice People Say

With the caveat that not all pro-choice people are the same and that they do not all have bad motives, here are some ways that propaganda, or disingenuous wording and terms, are employed by the pro-choice movement.




Of course, many people accuse pro-lifers of only being anti-abortion. And frankly, in some cases, that’s probably true. However, the vast majority of active pro-lifers are just that. Pro-Life


Dehumanizing the Fetus

The biggest propaganda tool used by the pro-choice movement is to dehumanize and denigrate the life of the fetusin particular and pregnancy in general.

For example, the pro-choice side often refers to pregnancy as a medical condition, while the pro-life side views it as a natural process. Referring to a pregnancy as a medical condition, i.e. a pathology or disease process, removes the idea of it being long-term or natural. Instead it’s seen as a problem that can be taken care of with a medical procedure. 

Most people are also familiar with the dehumanizing language used to refer to the preborn human. Clump of cells, tissue, product of conception, etc. The latest misinformation, coming from the same May 2019 NPR memo to journalists mentioned above, bizzarely involves referring to the baby’s heartbeat as “embryonic pulsing,” because: ” heartbeat activity can be detected “about six weeks into a pregnancy.” That’s at least a few weeks before an embryo is a fetus.” While it is technically true that the growing human being is still called an embryo at the time that its heart starts beating, no one calls it that and no one, pro life or pro choice, had ever called it that until the recent wave of “heartbeat bills” banning abortion after the preborn baby’s heartbeat can be detected. 

These are all ways of talking about a human being in order to dehumanize the fetal human growing in the womb. Because these euphemisms and techniques pit a pregnant woman against the tiny human growing inside of her, rather than supporting both mother and child, they constitute propaganda. They do not honor the objective truth of the humanity of the preborn person

What Pro-Life People Say

Humanizing the Preborn Person

A key strategy of the pro-life movement, on the other hand, is to humanize the child. For example, a common term used by pro-lifers is the word “preborn” rather than the word “un-born,” which indicates something that isn’t going to happen (i.e. work left un-done) rather than something that has not yet happened. “Preborn” emphasizes the ongoing development of the fetus in the womb. It shows that there is a process, which involves a natural progression from when the baby lives inside the womb to when the baby lives outside the womb.

Pregnant Women are Mothers


Fetus is a Medically Accurate Term



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    2 thoughts on “Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Rhetoric

    1. The difference between pro-life and anti-abortion is that in order to be pro-life you have to be pro-life even after the child is born. That means pro adoption, pro nationwide healthcare, pro welfare, pro family leave, and everything else that costs money and will effect the family after the child is born. If you aren’t pro all of those, than you aren’t pro-life at all, you’re just anti-abortion

    2. Regarding pro-life rhetoric, we need to “up the ante”:

      1. We often hear, even from pro-lifers, the term “crisis pregnancies”. Pro lifers should always speak of pregnancy as a gift, never a crisis. Abortion is the crisis.

      When a woman is raped, the crisis is NOT the fact she is pregnant, the crisis is the rape. If a father insists on his pregnant daughter having an abortion, the “crisis” is the dad.

      2. While it may be true pro-lifers are OK with calling a baby in the womb a fetus, doing so bolsters the pro-abort’s strategy of dehumanising a child in the womb. Call it what it is: a baby from the word “go”.

      3. Fearful of offending, pro lifers often shrink away from describing abortion as the brutal dismemberment of a child in the womb, or at an earlier stage, ripping apart and sucking out a child via a powerful vacuum device. We need to get over that.

      3. “Upping the ante,” also means (1) describing abortionists for what they are: murderers. (2) calling out all the accomplices that keep abortion in existence – accomplices include worldwide producers of abortion drugs, companies using body parts to test flavor enhancers, foundations funding pro-abort causes, companies whose CEO’s promote their health plans allowing for abortions.

      These are just a few examples. Over all of them stands the most important of all – and this is not “rhetoric”, it is truth: that God created man in his image and likeness, and his Word tells us “love protects.” If we all followed that simple “pro-life” principle, abortion would be cast down forever.

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