I think I can offer a somewhat unique perspective. Quite serendipitously,
I came to an ironic discovery about the abortion issue, having been a writing teacher.
I taught college level writing courses for six years, mostly freshman composition classes, at public colleges where proselytizing for any religion is illegal. For argument essays, students wanted to tackle “hot button” topics like capital punishment, gun control, stem-cell research, abortion, topics so overplayed in the media that for a writing teacher they have become clichés; as well, they’re highly prone to plagiarism as pirated essays of this kind abound on the Internet. The status quo arguments have little power to persuade anymore; many students were numb, or merely parroting back what they’d heard without reasoning it out for themselves. Despite the fact that these are important issues, I took the position of “outlawing” them, my excuse being that students rarely bring anything “new” to the table, which predictably caused rebellion. I’d say, “Let’s take abortion for example.” I began by reviewing **connotation **(the emotional associations we have with words) and **denotation **(their dictionary definitions). I asked students to call out words with “negative” connotations about children:
rug-rat, ankle-biter, condom mishap (not making that one up), snot-nosed brat, etc. Then I asked for overall “positive” connotations about children: *child, infant, toddler, baby *(which are really *neutral *terms, but in light of the preceding negative ones, they *seem *positive),
bundle-of-joy, mamma’s little angel, etc. I gave the typical spiel about how overly positive or negative terminology betrays a non-objective attitude, a
bias. Then, I asked for medical terminology: *zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus *(for the record, few said
blastocyst, except nursing students).
Then, with these words in three neat little columns on the board behind me, I told the tragic tale of a student who wrote about abortion for her 10 page research essay, spending **six pages **detailing the different abortion procedures, just to waste space
, without any reasoning of her own. She discussed in graphic detail (I
asked for vivid details of course) how the head of the fetus is crushed with forceps, its limbs dismembered, vacuumed up, etc. going into more detail than even many abortion websites do. I remember feeling a bit nauseous as I read (despite already knowing the facts), but thinking “What a strong pro-life essay.” Then, it turned out her thesis was Pro-Choice. I was floored. “This student’s laziness caused her downfall,” I warned my students, “for it was then that *I came to my great ironic discovery that you really cannot argue **for ***abortion by **describing **abortions.”
Strictly speaking,
as an argumentative strategy, it just doesn’t make sense.
When arguing for abortions, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you cast any bright light whatsoever on the very thing you’re advocating. A Pro-Life essay uses words with **connotations **most suited to their cause:
child, infant, baby, murder, whereas a Pro-Choice essay must rely on
zygote, fetus, medical procedure, vacuum aspiration, and no matter how you spin it, in the end,
there is no way to disguise the dismemberment of a human body. Once they recognized that irony, my pro-choice students usually became perturbed and yet the fact is that describing abortions in detail is gruesome; when disguised by terms with “neutral” connotations and non-emotionally charged language, they’re almost
spooky. It didn’t always change minds but it threw much light on how arguments can be constructed specifically to deceive, and
some arguments must deceive in order to succeed. If any teachers reading this want to incorporate this as a lesson, feel free. It’s not preaching. It’s promoting sound logical argumentative strategies.
As abortion posts are common, I may post this very story on other threads, so forgive me if you ever see it again–you know where it started. DL82’s proposition of Social change before Legal change is really the only way to go. I don’t ever want to see women imprisoned (as I don’t see Jesus ever wanting to see women imprisoned, or stoned to death, etc). The fact that abortion is murder is one thing, but to equate it with murder in the 1st is essentially
the false analogy fallacy–though death is death, abortion of an unborn human and the gun-shot murder of a grown person just don’t match up seamlessly point for point. Let us not rely on fallacies; there is enough logic in the truth.
