Abortion Abolitionists are Bending the Language to Their Will

 

There are those who would have you believe that Trump has “softened” his position on abortion. This is, of course, ridiculous. It presumes that he actually has a position to soften, which would require an actual thought process, something no longer in his skill set.

Trump, we can safely say, has no fixed position on anything. He’ll tell whatever lie he thinks might get him through the next news cycle, and you can practically hear the hundreds of recent lies clanking against each other in his brain. His abortion stance, if you can call it that, is not a reliable indicator of future performance.

Trump cares nothing about abortion, and as long as his friends can get one, he doesn’t mind if you can’t. If he can use the issue to rally his dwindling base, his personal beliefs will be immaterial.

But if you want to know how Trump is supposed to feel but doesn’t, look no further than JD Vance. Whenever you need the language bent to accommodate whatever lie the anti-abortion movement wants to tell that day, you can count on JD. Far more articulate on this, or any, subject than Trump, Vance has slithered his way into the vanguard of the anti-abortion movement.

While Trump continues to decline into a puddle of blithering nonsense, Vance brings far more coherence to the many lies he has to tell. It’s not that his ideas are any less deranged than Trump’s, just that he has the ability to assemble them into complete sentences.

Vance sees abortion as an obstacle to his ideal society, one that was vividly outlined, first in The Handmaid’s Tale, then in Project 2025.

He seems to believe that a woman’s role in society is to bear children and shut up. If her husband beats her several times a day, including when she’s pregnant, these are fresh opportunities for her to shut up. With practice she can get quite good at it.

To get us to this place, Vance needs to conspire with some amazingly malignant organizations, people long on zealotry and short on basic morality. They call themselves “abolitionists,” a desecration of that word’s venerable past.

Their goal is to ban abortion under any circumstances — no exceptions — and they’re determined to bring the full weight of the law down on any pregnant woman or healthcare practitioner who dares to favor the life of the mother over that of the fetus.

Most of us don’t even know these groups are out there, let alone how well- organized and well-funded they are. So once again, I am indebted to Jessica Valenti for shining light on them, and on the many ways they misuse language to make sure there’s always plenty of confusion around the subject.

Leading the list of semantic atrocities is the call for a “minimum national standard.” When Vance says he’s against a “national ban,” but that he thinks there needs to be “some kind of minimum standard,” he almost sounds reasonable, until you spot the razor in the apple.

Because a minimum national standard is exactly the same as a national ban. I’ll let Valenti explain the subtleties, but it comes down, as always, to Republicans blowing smoke. They make a big show of opposing any federal law that would ban all abortions with no exceptions, which is an easy position to take, since no foreseeable Congress would pass such a law.

Instead they call for a minimum standard, a specific number of weeks after which abortion is illegal. And they want to focus all discussion on that number, as opposed to a woman’s right to run her own life.

What number do they have in mind? Most Republican candidates won’t touch that question this late in the election cycle, but recent rhetoric points to fifteen weeks. They portray this as some sort of benevolent compromise. It’s anything but.

Because as long as the law’s “exceptions” are ambiguous enough to intimidate doctors into inaction, the number of weeks is irrelevant. As long as the entire medical community is reluctant to risk imprisonment to intervene in pregnancies that go awry, a minimum standard becomes indistinguishable from a total ban. Just like Texas, but national.

To that end, the abolitionists have pre-planned their public responses to what they know will happen as a result of their barbaric laws. They understood, from the day the Dobbs decision was handed down, that it was only a matter of time before women would start dying, and that the public outrage would be intense. In Poland, one such death lit the fuse that brought down an entire government.

So when Amber Nicole Thurman died needlessly in Georgia, they knew just how to spin it: Blame the doctors.

In a flurry of press releases, they declared that Thurman’s doctors had “misinterpreted the law,” which allows exceptions for “the life of the mother.”

Never mind that those so-called exceptions were vague to the point of meaninglessness. Never mind that the climate of fear had long since taken over the Georgia medical community. Never mind that no doctor would dare to treat a woman with a problem pregnancy —not until she could categorically prove she was dying.

As the election gets closer, we can expect the rhetoric around abortion to get increasingly slippery. Listen for Republican candidates to try to walk back their past positions, adopting the language of the abolitionists. Listen for phrases like “minimum national standard” and “doctors misinterpret the law,”

The abolitionists know full well that most people despise the Dobbs decision. They know that this year’s ballot initiatives are a direct threat to their movement. They know that a president like Kamala Harris could set them back decades, even with the Supreme Court watching their back.

And they know that obfuscation and subterfuge are crucial to achieving their objectives, which is why they’ll continue to pepper us with coded language and verbal misdirection.

They’re desperate to have gullible voters look at the abortion question on their ballots, and check the wrong box.