The brilliant Mrs. Jones was reading the New York Times the other day when she ran across the article “Protecting Pregnant Women in Car Accidents.” The article itself is not really that interesting or within the purview of this blog (well, except for those of you sporting an ever growing fundus or who happen to be the CEO of a major auto manufacturer) but we noticed something curious.
I quote Tara Parker-Pope, wellness writer extraordinaire: “Most parents buckle children in car seats to protect them on the road. But how does a pregnant driver protect the child she is carrying? States are not required to track fetal deaths when reporting accident data, but it is estimated that 300 to 1,000 unborn children die in car accidents each year…”
Did you catch it? She called them “unborn children,” not fetuses. Slip of the tongue? I don’t think so. Ms. Parker-Pope refers them this way three times in the first two paragraphs. This so surprised these Joneses that I went back and checked to see whether the Times has a policy on what it calls the unborn. I mean, these things tend to out themselves with selective language: pro-choicers call them fetuses, which at least sounds scientific, while pro-lifers call them the unborn or, if we really want to mutilate the sentence, the pre-born. And the NY Times is not particularly well known for their pro-life bona fides.
So I looked up articles where the Times could have used the term “unborn child,” namely, in their coverage of Laci and Conner’s Law or The Unborn Victims of Violence Act. I read six articles and found that, yes, the Times does have a specified term – "fetus." Ok, no surprise there, I guess. But this did surprise me, from the Editors dated April 25, 2001:
“The goal is to enshrine in law the concept of ‘fetal rights,’ equal to but separate and distinct from the rights of pregnant women. In essence, the bill would elevate the status of a fetus, embryo or other so-called ‘unborn child’ to that of a ‘person’ by amending the Federal criminal code to add a separate offense for causing death or bodily injury to a ‘child’ who is ‘in utero.’''
Ah. I see." So-called 'unborn children'." Unborn children that should be called embryos and fetuses. Interesting.
Now it might be a bit much to ask the Times for consistency in their terminology because they have bigger things to worry about (like plummeting circulation) but I will have to keep an eye on Ms. Parker-Pope – she might be in jeopardy of losing her job for all those references to so-called unborn children.
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2 comments:
I have no problem with calling the preborn "fetuses". It means "little ones", and that is what they are. I am an adult, my eldest is an adolescent, the middle child a toddler, the youngest an infant, etc.
But I would just LOVE IT if there would be some consistency in legal terminology when it comes to the contents of a woman's uterus. Everything under the sky falls into one of two categories: person or property. The pro-choice position is basically, "It's a person when I want it to be a person; it's property when I want it disposed of." Sick-o.
Shame on me for not checking my OED. My point was that the NY Times uses "fetus" to dehumanize the, as you put it so succinctly, contents of a woman's uterus (or fundus, so long as we're bringing up fun pregnancy words).
The brilliant Mrs. Jones was recently researching pre-Civil War use of the Bible in defense of slave owning for a paper and we noticed a striking similarity between the slavers use of the word chattel to dehumanize their slaves (chattel meaning property, related to the word cattle) and the pro-abortionists use of fetus.
Also, as to the law, I totally agree. Technically, I believe fetus only applies to the unborn after they are two to four months gestation. Prior to that they are considered an embryo (fetus referring to the baby's mimicking the shape of it's parent). So I would actually applaud the authors of the Unborn Victims Act for using "unborn" as a catch-all. It avoids debate over trimesters, gestational months, etc.
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