The Language of Personhood
American Life League has been working hard to educate pro-lifers about what personhood is, why it is important, and how it works with various audiences in the U.S. and abroad. Most recently, ALL’s senior congressional liaison, Johanna Dasteel, gave a presentation to students at St. Michael’s High School in Fredericksburg, VA, on the topic. It focused on the history and importance of the efforts pro-lifers have made to have the term “person” in our state and federal constitutions defined so that it applies to every human being—including the preborn.
Also emphasized in the presentation was the importance of the use of language. By making others more aware of language, we can turn everyday conversations into opportunities to subtly communicate the pro-life message that preborn babies are people too!
All too often, pro-lifers fall into the habit of depersonalizing preborn babies by using impersonal, rather than personal, pronouns. With words such as When is it due?” or “It has its own unique set of DNA,” the message conveyed is that somehow the preborn baby is less than human. Also heard frequently is the exclamation, “You’re going to be a daddy!” This fails to recognize the fact that the man is already a father.
Indeed, very often, the language used is inexact. Phrases such as “human life begins at conception,” “life is sacred,” and “sanctity of human life,” although used for years, are just not precise enough.
The word “conception,” for example has different meanings than are readily apparent. Again and again the term is used by lawmakers and religious leaders. Unaware, they are playing into the hand of Planned Parenthood and its cohorts. In 1965, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists changed its definition of conception from being a reference to the process of “fertilization” to “implantation”—a later process by which the human embryo implants in his or her mother’s uterus. This was a political move intended to quiet any opposition to hormonal contraceptives. When using the term this way, ACOG and its affiliated doctors could assure the public that birth control doesn’t kill preborn children because, by this redefinition, pregnancy doesn’t begin until implantation. Now our laws have been thus influenced, so any time conception is used in a pro-life law, what the pro-lifer intends by that word is not its actual interpretation.
The term “Human life” is not only too vague to have an impact, but even more ineffective is stripping it down to refer to a person as simply “life.” The fact is that it is specifically every “human being’s life” that needs to be nurtured, protected and recognized for what it is – a human person. One would never say, “Hey! Look at that life over there!” Rather, we would say, “Look at that person over there!”
So, why is it that pro-lifers have fallen into the habit of referring to the preborn person as “human life,” “life,” and “it”?
The fact is that the paradigm of the pro-life movement has shifted back to our original concept, but the language has not followed suit. The pro-life movement is, when all is said and done, a human rights effort. It is a struggle to have every human being recognized as a human person with equal rights, equal protection, and equality of justice.
Every human being must be recognized as a person. Any objection to this statement smacks of prejudice. Planned Parenthood knows this, which is why its representatives never face the language of personhood initiatives head on. Instead, they claim clairvoyance and predict a doomsday scenario for whatever state they are trying to keep imprisoned by the lie that preborn human beings are not persons, but property to be terminated, experimented on, and discarded.
American Life League has been working hard so that our lawmakers and religious leaders understand this history and what it means for moving ahead in our activism. Conception is no longer an effective word for us.
Another word that must be understood by all involved is “asexual” reproduction. This sounds like something Orwellian, something out of science fiction. But, for example, in every set of naturally occurring identical twins, one was created through sexual reproduction and the other through asexual reproduction – no mystery, just the science of reproduction. And there are other children created by unconventional means in laboratories that are also human beings and, therefore, human persons.
Because of this, we can no longer rely on the term “fertilization” to refer to the beginning of a human being’s life. Rather, we must use very plain language that passes muster for both medical and legal experts alike. Each human being is a person from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.
This means, when you find out that your daughter is pregnant and her due date is in November, you are not “going to be a grandma,” you already are a grandma. Your grandchild is already alive and already a human person.
