One of my pet peeves is the fact that even people who favor abortion rights have allowed the anti-abortion crowd to call themselves “pro-life”. Those who favor abortion rights, rather than just insisting on the term “anti-abortion” have simply opted for calling themselves pro-choice. In my own humble opinion, this has meant that the anti-abortion crowd (which happens to be distinctly anti-life on issues like the death penalty, war generally, and torture) has been allowed to claim the rhetorical high ground. After all, how many people are willing to consider themselves “anti-life”. This widely accepted nomenclature allows pollsters to frame questions like this:
With respect to the abortion issue, do you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?
Assuming a representative sample, what percentage of the respondents comes down as “pro-life” out of sheer ignorance. I consider myself pro-life, though I would know well enough what they are getting at in this question. This is not an isolated case. I wrote a couple of years ago about an exit poll question to which I was asked to respond that implied that conservatives had a lock on moral values.
The above poll question yielded a 51% anti-abortion response rate, while a somewhat more neutrally worded question:
Do you think abortion should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal under all circumstances.
yielded a response rate of 76% who feel that abortion should be legal under any or certain circumstances, with the extremes (legal “under any” and “illegal under all”) polling about even.
The right is usually wrong on the issues, but they have read their Orwell, and are quite adept at distorting language to suit their ends. From pro-life, to ethnic cleansing to enhanced interrogation techniques, etc., they know how to turn a phrase, and too many otherwise reasonable people adopt their phraseology.
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