It was a revealing choice of words to stress, or rather not stress, in a lawsuit over abortion, beginning with the A-word itself: Abortion.
When the state of Arkansas canceled Planned Parenthood's contract to provide services under Medicaid because of its connections to abortion, Planned Parenthood struck back by filing suit. What, us do abortions? We're just providing "family planning" and "other preventative services." Few things are more revealing than euphemisms, for they have a way of revealing just what the people who use them don't want revealed. In this case, Planned Parenthood's role in providing abortions.
It was as if the only thing going on in all those "clinics" that Planned Parenthood runs are ordinary medical checkups. To quote the language of its legal challenge to the Hutchinson administration, "Medicaid enrollees may seek family planning and other preventative services from a participating provider of their choice and have those services provided by Medicaid." Planned Parenthood felt no need to mention that it need not be one of those "participating providers." Not with a host of other agencies, private and public, the kind that don't believe in taking human life, standing by to deliver every medical service but abortion.
To quote Asa Hutchinson--governor, lawyer and a man who respects the plain meaning of words--"Not withstanding the lawsuit, I remain satisfied that we did the right thing to reflect Arkansas values." Not to say human values in general. Or are we supposed to just swallow hard and overlook those contentious videos of officials with Planned Parenthood putting a price on fetal body parts? Talk about a callous disregard for human life, and humane values.
No, thank you, some of us would really rather have nothing to do with the whole bloody business of abortion. And with Planned Parenthood--whether its abortions are performed in a clinic or are drug-induced at home. Because the best thing to do when encountering evil, however legalized, euphemized, and generally covered up, is to stay away from it. Far, far away. And certainly not try to rationalize it.
C.S. Lewis had a term for the way we kill words that say too much: verbicide. As in verbicide precedes homicide. Kill the word and its meaning may die with it.
Governor Hutchinson's manners are impeccable, and his vocabulary respectable, but there are those--like us--who would not have taken it amiss if he had responded to Planned Parenthood's legal gamesmanship with a simple: "Sue and be damned!"
There are human lives at stake here, and human dignity. The immediate victims are the most innocent among us, and the least able to defend themselves. Which means the rest of us should consider it not only a duty but a moral imperative to defend them. To just stand by and say nothing while the innocent are slaughtered is to put our own souls in danger, for there are times when silence is a sin. Or as Edmund Burke told us, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
But apologists for abortion may feel they cannot afford to be candid. Which is how killing the least of these becomes Choice--because the plain meaning of words must be avoided. And so abortion is repackaged as Family Planning Services.
Why not call abortion abortion? Because that would make it much too clear what is going in here.
Here is a question for all the good people who support abortion, and there are lots of them--good, honest, sincere people who wouldn't hurt a fly. (As opposed to a baby in her mother's womb.) Why all these word games? Why downplay what's really happening when a child yet to be born is aborted? Because to put the truth plain would hurt too much.
Think about it. Abortion is no longer a crime, at least not on the statute books. Why then does it have to be called something else--Choice, or in this case Family Planning Services? Because the truth hurts. At least when told straight, unvarnished, with the bark off. Instead we'd rather not face it. So we hide behind legalisms, euphemisms and whatever else is necessary to disguise what we're giving our consent to. And silence does still give consent.
It takes courage to face what has happened and is happening in this supposedly God-fearing society. One recalls what Jefferson said when he contemplated the widespread acceptance of human slavery in his time: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."
To quote another advocate of human life--and plain speech: "The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake. Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception."--John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae, 1995.
No wonder some of us refer to that pope as John Paul the Great. Have his words two decades ago become any less true or any less urgent over the years that have passed since? On the contrary, they have grown only more relevant, as Planned Parenthood's word games demonstrate.
Editorial on 09/17/2015