Trust the Professionals 

You’ve probably seen the bumper sticker: “Against abortion? Don’t have one.” Pithy. It always makes me think of another possible bumper sticker: “Against slavery? Don’t own one.”

Abortion advocates resist talking about what is being aborted: a kid. They call it a “fetus,” which sounds like a technical medical term, nice and abstract. They also resist using the word kill, which is what abortion does to the kid. They prefer phrases like termination of pregnancy, a painless, bloodless euphemism.

Why the evasions? Well, George Orwell explained it pretty well in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” When people want to avoid conjuring up mental images of what they’re really talking about, they resort to the vague, the abstract, the Latinate to disguise the violence of the subject.

Such language has the added advantage of sounding educated. It makes it seem positively vulgar to speak of “baby-killing.” Uneducated New Jersey Catholic housewives talk about “baby-killing”; educated people, in touch with their inner Ivy Leaguer, prefer the more decorous “termination of pregnancy.”

The other day I had to get shots for my dog. I took her to a local animal clinic and got an estimate of about $80. I winced, but agreed. Later the veterinarian — one of those horrible American professional women — gave me a polysyllabic lecture about all the other arcane procedures my pet also needed, with the implication that no responsible owner would refuse them. I nodded numbly, hardly grasping a word, and found myself paying more than $130. More than $50 wasted, because I hadn’t had the nerve to insist on plain English.

I’m sure that woman makes a fortune off people who are ashamed to interrupt her to admit they don’t understand words she counts on their not understanding. When I did ask questions, she seemed to resent being asked to explain what she meant. In her shop, the customer is always wrong. Or is at least expected to defer to the expert. Making the customer feel stupid is included in the service.

The whole abortion debate has been deformed by such linguistic snobbery, which has succeeded in obscuring the simple and obvious. The plain fact is that a living thing — a human being in the early stages of life — is being killed. Why not say so?

Insecticides and rat poisons boast that they “kill” bugs and rodents; the verb doesn’t make us squeamish in those contexts. Why should abortion advocates be uneasy about using it for their own purposes? Killing the “fetus” is the whole idea.

Does the kid suffer when it’s being killed? A natural question to ask, but a question we’re not supposed to ask. Abortion advocates try not to let it come up, because they really don’t care.

Their ruthlessness is evident in the debate over “partial-birth abortion.” They don’t like this phrase, and neither do I. It’s not even abortion in the usual sense. It’s the killing of a kid who is ready to be born by sucking its brains out and crushing its skull. It’s so ugly that even most abortionists can’t bear to do it.

But our unbiased liberal news media are especially vague about it. They call it “a certain rare abortion procedure,” without mentioning skulls and brains, let alone showing pictures of this “procedure.”

The whole tone of the abortion advocates, including journalists who pretend they aren’t advocating anything, is that of professionals addressing ignorant laymen, impatient with naive questions — just like the aforementioned veterinarian. Listen to your betters! Trust us, we’re the doctors!

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by talk of “elites” in a country whose creed is that all men are created equal. But I suppose it has something to do with the use of big words — quasi-professional jargon — to cow people out of using their own common sense. Our indiscriminate reverence for education causes us to concede authority to those who master a certain kind of glibness.

It’s a curious fact that so many of us prefer the “counterintuitive” to our native reason. We pay huge sums for grotesque paintings and sit through performances of ugly music. Nobody has the nerve to boo a fraudulent artist nowadays; that would be bad taste. After all, the artist is a professional now. We’re supposed to assume he knows what he’s doing, like a doctor. We even subsidize him with our taxes.

Is it any wonder that we put up with lying nonsense in our public life?

Joseph Sobran