Northern Valley Beacon

During the debate on resolutions regarding HB 1215, the abortion ban, and other threats to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, at the South Dakota Democratic Convention, the recurrence of a certain term revealed how deeply brain-washing techniques have penetrated our culture.

The term "pro-life" kept popping out of the mouth of hapless speakers. The term is a phony coinage. It came about when anti-abortion people realized that there were two problems with being called anti-abortion advocates. The first is that "anti-abortion" is a term of negativism, and politically it appears more advantageous to be for something. The second problem is that the anti-abortion forces were being recognized as obsessed with a single issue. So, some people contrived the term "pro-life" to attempt evade the more precise label of "anti-abortion" and to disguise that the anti-abortion program extends to gaining jackboot control over medical decisions, personal decisions, and who can control the information involved in such decisions.

The term "pro-life" was coined to project a false implication. The opposite of pro-life is anti-life or pro-death. The idea behind the coined term is to suggest that those who do not adhere to the doctrines of the anti-abortionists are against life itself. Most people recognize the stupidly malicious implication and the crude motives behind use of the term. However, constant repetition has made it common usage to the unwary.
(Note: This passage was deleted for some technical reason from the original post, and an alert colleague picked it up.)

Of course, as is so painfully obvious in the process through which HB 1215 was signed into law, the anti-abortion forces are anything but pro-life. They have contrived to criminalize anyone who does not accept their intrusion and domination into personal life, who does not accept their primitive superstition and phony science, and who does not accept the dictation of public policy by officials of the totalitarian churches.

The Republicans must have read George Orwell at some time, because they have been successful at getting the false term "pro-life" used by journalists and ordinary people. Orwell recognized early on how eletronic media could be manipulated as a device of operant conditioning by
saturating the culture with terms that the totalitarian forces wanted substituted for the more accurate and truthful terms. Like animals that learn to bark and roll over for a treat or for relief from negative conditioining--punishment--people have absorbed this false term into the language.

I suggested to some voting delegates at the convention that they should get up and admonish speakers when they used the term "pro-life" instead of "anti-abortion." People have the right to be anti-abortion, but they do not have the right to use a deceptive and dishonest term to hide their true motives.

If you substituted the term "anti-abortion" for every time "pro-life" was used on the convention floor, you would have quite a different debate.

As the 2006 campaign progresses, we need communications watchdogs to point out whenever counterfeit terms such as "pro-life" are used and to check the facts of everything said.

We got a late start with Factcheck.org and the upper midwest Press Project in the 2004 campaign. This time we need to get it right.

It's "anti-abortion," stupid, not "pro-life."