Euphemisms and Other Evasions
By Audrey Stallsmith
We just watched the movie Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer. It was based on the true story of an abortion doctor who killed several babies after they had been born alive by snipping their spinal cords. He was charged with and convicted of first degree murder.
The elephant in the room that the prosecutor had to dance around was that there isn’t much difference between killing a baby just after it is expelled from the womb rather than just before. The result is the same; the baby is dead. So it’s no wonder that the doctor saw nothing wrong with what he was doing.
Just how a fetus suddenly transforms into a baby, either in the third trimester or as soon as it is born, never has been adequately explained by the pro-choice crowd. In Healer, nutritionist Dr. Hazel Parcells did at least make a stab at it by saying that the baby’s body only is a vehicle for the soul and that the "first breath of life brings into being a personality." Since she apparently believed in reincarnation, let us just say that her nutritional advice seemed sounder than her philosophy!
Granted, Gosnell’s method of killing may have been more grisly than that of other abortion providers, most of whom do theirs in a much more sterile environment than his inner city clinic. But the dismemberment of the fetus inside the womb or the less often employed partial birth abortion procedure that I mentioned in "Baby, It’s Cold Outside"—in which the baby’s brains sometimes are sucked out while it still is partially inside the mother—is just as grisly. Not to mention heartbreaking.
In other words, calling a baby a "fetus" does not make what happens to it during abortion any less shocking or immoral. But we seem to be trying to fudge over sins these days by renaming them in a tactful sort of way.
The dictionary defines euphemism as "a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing." We all use such expressions, in hopes that terms such as "passed away" may help soften the sudden shock of "died." But too many of us these days seem to be employing those evasions to soften our sense of right and wrong as well.
For example, referring to what used to be called "shacking up" as "cohabitation" still doesn’t make it anything other than fornication, according to scripture. Even the dictionary bears that out, since it defines fornication as "voluntary sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons or two persons not married to each other." In other words, it covers both "living in sin" before marriage and adultery after marriage.
And, according to scripture, there is no doubt about the "sin" part. In Matthew 15:19, Christ includes fornications in a list of other immoralities along with murders and adulteries. Paul, in I Corinthians 6:9, follows suit by listing fornicators among those who "shall not inherit the kingdom of God." Unless, of course, they repent and change their ways.
So why do some who call themselves Christian suddenly think it is okay for them to have a sexual relationship without the commitment which must go along with it? Back in 1926, G. K. Chesterton predicted in G. K.'s Weekly that "The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. . .The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan." How right he turned out to be!
In her book, Smoke on the Mountain (originally published in 1954), Joy Davidman concedes that the so-called sexual revolution may be partly due to the fact that women "have suffered in dumb resentment the double standard, explicitly condemned by Christ, which stoned the woman and let the man go unscathed. The true and Christian remedy, obviously, is to hold the men to as high a standard as the women.
"Finding that impracticable in a man's world, however, many women have concluded that the remedy is to behave as badly as the men; and in an age of birth control and economic freedom they can often get away with it. We've all heard the arguments—something like this: 'My self-expression as an individual demands sexual freedom!. . .Why shouldn't I follow love?'
"Because it is not love; because it is the pursuit of one's own pleasure coupled with a disregard of the needs and emotions of the other people involved; because it begins in self-love and ends in lovelessness."
I could add another reason to that. Because very few methods of birth control are foolproof; because you might make a child that you don’t want; because you might then have to kill that child to prevent it from interfering with your self-expression.
As Davidman concludes, "But try to tell them that! You will be informed that you are old-fashioned, Puritanical, and ignorant of modem science." Actually, I’m probably going to be called Puritanical for pointing out that there would be far less call for the sin of abortion if there weren’t so many people indulging in the sin of fornication. But some of us Puritans prefer to believe that when God said "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God," He meant that there were more important things than our own devices and desires.