A viral video hit yesterday. It shows a young woman debating Ben Shapiro about abortion. She's disturbing to watch because she's so frantic that she reminded me of a 33 1/3 record played at 45 RPMs. (For younger readers, this explains what I mean.) However, the real problem isn't the gal's hyperadrenalized behavior. It is, instead, her contention that "abortion" means merely ending a pregnancy rather than killing a baby. No wonder she cannot understand why conservatives are so upset about abortion!
The question is, how did someone who clearly has had some contact with academia (I say that because she speaks in academic-sounding gibberish) come up with such an insanely stupid idea, one that sees her conflating a C-section with an abortion? Or put another way, how did she become the living embodiment of Reagan's saying, "The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so"?
What I discovered is that the sources of available information on the internet to which people routinely turn, everything from dictionaries to medical sites to government sites, hide the ball about abortion's reality.
To its credit, Merriam-Webster plays it straight. It defines an abortion as "the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus" (emphasis mine), whether achieved through a miscarriage or an "induced" expulsion. That's accurate.
However, other sites obscure rather than illuminate the word's meaning. For example, Dictionary.com has as its first and second definitions for abortion "[1] the removal of an embryo or fetus from the uterus in order to end a pregnancy. [2] any of various surgical methods for terminating a pregnancy, especially during the first six months" (emphasis mine).
Nowhere on the page does Dictionary.com explicitly state that abortion kills the fetus. So, if that excitable young woman went to Dictionary.com, she could easily infer that abortion ends a pregnancy without ending a life.
At MedlinePlus.gov, a taxpayer-funded NIH site that boasts of its 25 years of "Trusted Health Information For You," the information seeker is told that "An induced abortion is a procedure to end a pregnancy" (emphasis mine). There is no mention of the fact that the pregnancy ends with the baby dead.
Abortion is the removal of pregnancy tissue, products of conception or the fetus and placenta (afterbirth) from the uterus. In general, the terms fetus and placenta are used after eight weeks of pregnancy. Pregnancy tissue and products of conception refer to tissue produced by the union of an egg and sperm before eight weeks. (Emphasis mine.)
The World Health Organization also forgets to tell the person seeking information that the procedure kills a baby:
Abortion is a common health intervention. It is very safe when carried out using a method recommended by WHO, appropriate to the pregnancy duration and by someone with the necessary skills.
[snip]
Unsafe abortion is an important preventable cause of maternal deaths and morbidities. It can lead to physical and mental health complications and social and financial burdens for women, communities and health systems.
The whole long page relentlessly pushes the virtues of abortion but never once mentions that it means that a baby will die.
All sorts of other definitional sites are the same. Whether they use advocacy language for abortions, as WHO and Wikipedia do, or dive into the weeds of procedure, as Britannica does, they're all coy about what happens to that expelled, salinized, or otherwise evacuated or removed fetus.
For a young woman raised in the modern world, it's truly hit and miss as to whether she'll ever land upon a site that honestly tells her what an abortion does. No wonder leftists are so adamant about keeping pro-lifers off campuses and away from abortion clinics. From their perspective, if ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. And the less these young women know about the reality of the abortions they're so frantically fighting for, the better.