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n a November-December 1989 memo sent out electronically to its news service subscribers, The New York Times informed inquiring editors that the Times’ policy is to describe opposition to abortion not as prolife but as antiabortion. Regional and local practice have come to imitate the elite media’s acceptance of the term “prochoice” and its rejection of “’prolife” or “right-to-life” (see Sipe, 1989). In his three-part series on abortion reportage, Los Angeles Times Pulitzer award winner David Shaw (1990b) concluded that major print and television media almost always report about abortion in terms favoring those who defend it. Ethan Bronner of the Boston Globe told Shaw that “opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists, is not a legitimate civilized position in our society.”

It’s likely that editors think of their use of these terms as value-neural. Gans (1979:191-92) astutely observes that the majority of elite journalists consider themselves non-ideological. Even more astutely, he adds, ‘”At the same time, the journalists’ definition of ideology is self-serving, if not intentionally so, for it blinds them to the fact that they also have ideologies, even if they are largely unconscious.” For example, the following appears in the New York Times (1989) memo sent around the country about the use of fair terms in abortion reporting, “WE DO USE: women, not mother, in reference to a pregnant woman. Everyone agrees she’s a woman; some say she isn’t a mother until she gives birth. WE DO USE: fetus, not baby, in reference to the embryo [sic] she carries. There’s agreement that it’s a fetus, no agreement that it’s a baby.” Needless to say, these choices are not morally innocent. Critics could point out that they prejudge the entire moral debate in subtle ways and, in effect, settle it.

Indeed, legal abortion activists knew from the start how important it was to avoid or to neutralize any reference to the object of abortion. Faux (1988:235) reports that the coordinator of amici curiae pro-Roe briefs promoted the term “prochoice” in the briefs and “cautioned brief writers never to use the word ‘baby’ [or] the strident, hackle-raising expression ‘abortion on demand.’ “

More than most social movements, the ones that emerged around abortion have dealt with conflicts about “correct naming.” What do we call the object of abortion? Abortion opponents speak of unborn babies, while proponents prefer “fetal tissue” or ‘’the products of conception.” Science has not helped, for those with acknowledged scientific credentials can be produced by protagonists to describe the object of abortion as “human life” or as merely “potential human life.” See, for example, the extensive testimony given on April 23, April 24, and May 20, 1981, during the hearings before the Subcommittee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate on S. 158, called “The Human Life Bill,” whose section 1 declared: “The Congress finds that present day scientific evidence indicates a significant likelihood that actual human life exists from conception.”

Seeking a Sociologically Correct Name For Abortion Opponents
James R. Kelly
From Abortion politics in the United States and Canada: Studies in public opinion
Edited by Ted G. Jelen and Marthe A. Chandler
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994. pp. 15-40.)
HQ 767.5 U5 A267 1994
ISBN 0275945618
https://web.archive.org/web/20150715231029/http://with-friends-like-these-who-needs-enemies.org/Kelly.html