Lakoff and the language of reproductive rights

Lately, the Republicans have made great efforts to take control of the vocabulary in which issues are discussed. They’re personal accounts, not private accounts, and don’t ever call it privatization, we’re told; it’s the constitutional option, not the nuclear option; the prisoners were mistreated or at worst abused, not tortured, and certainly not in a gulag. For a party led by a man who doesn’t know the difference between disassemble and dissemble and can’t pronounce nuclear, the R’s sure know how to control a debate by grabbing the commanding lexical heights.

As someone interested in the use, abuse and misuse of language in politics, I’ve been following linguist George Lakoff’s work off and on since reading an article of his — this one I think — during the first Gulf War about the use of metaphor by Bush the Elder et al in their arguments in favor of going to war. I haven’t gotten around to Don’t Think of an Elephant — expensive for such a short book, and always checked out of the library — but I got the impression that he was better at deconstructing how Republicans framed their arguments than at helping Democrats construct their frames. His AlterNet article posted yesterday on reproductive rights issues suggests that he has now put the cart entirely before the horse, suggesting that D’s drop not only the words “abortion” and “choice,” but back down from the policies themselves in favor of ones that can be better framed. Being smart about how one presents policies to the public is one thing, subordinating the, uh, choice of policies to PR is quite another.

The word abortion, Lakoff says, suggests a situation in which “something has gone terribly wrong,” and the word choice comes from a consumerist vocabulary, whereas “life” comes from a moral vocabulary, and morality trumps consumerism. So whoever uses the most pompous, sanctimonious language wins? That would only be the case if everyone shared the same view of morality; Jerry Falwell and Tony “I’m not even going to swat that fly” Perkins may use the word “life” all they want, but it won’t be persuasive to those who don’t think like them.

Having stripped us of the words choice (he prefers decision, as less frivolous-sounding — Margaret Sanger coined the term “family planning” for similar reasons — but the word choice entails not only the act of choosing but the right to choose; also, “pro-decision movement” sounds goofy) and abortion (to which he offers no alternative), he wants to shift the debate to issues he thinks can be better packaged, like “zero tolerance [!] for unwanted pregnancies,” which R’s are helping to increase the number of by preventing access to contraception and sex ed., and the excessive infant mortality in America, mercury and other toxins in breast milk from right-wing environmental policies. On these issues, he says, the left’s policies are the ones that value life. Which is true, of course, but all those issues are practical, pragmatic ones, but he’s suggesting giving up or severely downplaying support of human rights — the rights of privacy and bodily integrity — in favor of them, which does not seem to me like taking the moral high ground, but ceding it.

He then suggests foregrounding rape victims as the women most in need of access to abortion, which is the mirror-image of the right-to-lifers’ slippery-slope strategy of making inroads on the right to abortion by first eliminating the most squirm-inducing type of abortion, so-called partial-birth abortion.

As I said at the start, the right wingers have been attempting, with a great deal of success, to force their opponents to debate using a vocabulary chosen by the right. Yesterday the NYT noted that the groups which place excess embryos created during fertility treatment in the wombs of good Christian women have been trying to replace the term “embryo donation” with “embryo adoption,” and that that language has been dutifully taken up by the government. The term is intended to implant the notion that life begins at conception. Personally I worry less that this sort of thing will increase the status of clumps of cells to that of human children, than that blurring the line between them will subtly reduce the status of actual living human beings, whose minds and meat are just casings for a soul which was already perfectly realized shortly after daddy ejaculated.