25/07/2022
Semantically, abortion is not and can never be a reproductive right. It is not even the right not to reproduce. To claim it is a reproductive right is akin to insisting that the right to throw up is the same as the right to eat kebab after having partaken of a skinful on a Friday night after work.
It may be that one day there will be a universal right to terminate pregnancies, at least in certain circumstances. But if that happens then it will still not be a reproductive right. It will have its own title; "abortion right" or "reproduction reversal right," for example.
I am banging on about this at the moment because the term "reproductive rights" has been hijacked and perverted by certain (and, boy, are they certain!) people in order to shame anyone who does not agree with them about abortion and to force those who agree with them in part, to agree with them fully, by cancelling the possibility of having a complicated or not yet fully formed opinion on the issue. For example, in the Big Brother world of word weaponisation, a person who is totally in favour of r**e victims being allowed to terminate a consequent pregnancy if carried expeditiously but who is not in favour of the late-term abortion of babies who will be born with Down's syndrome automatically becomes someone who is against reproductive rights because alternative descriptors have been erased by they who must get their own way.
This disingenuous and malicious corruption of language, which is being employed by both liberals and conservatives alike with the deliberate and engineered intent of making people fearful of open debate is, possibly, the greatest threat to the fruits of the Western Enlightenment that we face at this time. That many are embracing the Newspeak of the Cultural Wars without knowing that they have been duped into doing so by linguistic tyrants is so very sad and disappointing.
We are better than this.