Two things happened to a 10-year-old Ohio girl in the last few months. The first- someone committed an incalculable evil against her. She was violently raped and put into a state of terror and fright as a grotesque monster of a man violated her and forever changed her life.
The second- she, along with her parents, in turn committed a more horrific act of violence. Discovering she was unable to kill her child in her home state, she traveled to Indiana, where she ended the life of the soul growing inside of her. In doing so, her parents became complicit and seemingly the driving factors in the death of an innocent victim, compounding the tragedy of the situation.
With the story causing worldwide outrage, it’s given abortion-right advocates a hard case to hang around our necks. Abortion in cases of rape or incest is incredibly low, making up less than 1% of reasons for abortion, but to hear some of these people, that’s all the want to talk about. Their strategy is simple: beat us up with the bad ones until we reveal our heartlessness. Despite their haranguing, being pressed with imagery of a child with legs in stirrups and with a distended belly should not cause us to flinch or falter. If a life is a life is a life, then consistency would demand that all abortions be abolished, without exception, even for children who become pregnant through no fault of their own.
This is not an easy position to take in the face of our accusatory culture. Activists wield “edge cases” as weapons, bringing up the blistering incongruity of child rape as a means to batter the abolitionist imperative, seeking to shock the conscience and have us swallow back the words of defense, turning a stammer into silence.
Don’t let them. Don’t stay silent. Shout! The fact that Ohio so far has not bent the knee to these fiery darts should give us cause to celebrate. Don’t let them use sanitized language when describing what these parents and bloodthirsty baby butcher have done to this child: keep the graphic nature of it at the forefront of your mind and tongue.
In the book 1984, Orwell envisioned a language called ‘Newspeak’ which culled truthful yet subversive speech out of the vocabulary over a period of decades. As the vocabulary diminished, so did the ability to articulate known truths, so that only approved language remains. Anyone seeking to fight back was stopped by an inability to express themselves or mount a needed offense.
This is what has happened with the language surrounding abortion over the last 40 years. Both culture and then nice Christian leaders asked us to tame our tongues and temper our rhetoric, turning what should be prophetic protestations and fiery declarations into nuanced niceties, adopting the language and expressions of the enemy to make it more difficult to combat them.
“Don’t call it ‘murder.’ Don’t refer to clinics as ‘murder mills.’ Don’t call the medical centers ‘abortuaries.’ Don’t deny the humanity of clinic workers by calling them ‘deathscorts’ or ‘bloodworkers.’ Don’t call abortions providers ‘abortion ghouls.’ Don’t you know that’s inflammatory and unchristlike?
By doing so, we are told that we are loving women, being sensitive to their feelings, and ensuring that they will be emotionally attuned and receptive to our conversations when the topic of the fate of their fetus is finally broached. This genteel broaching and watered-down witness is what the principalities, the powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, and the spiritual wickedness in high places want more than anything.
Every time we play this game by pulling our punching, curbing our words, and make exceptions for edge cases, we coach the culture to blunt abortion’s scandal and minimize its horror by maximizing the inoffensiveness of what is a bloody and barbaric practice. If it’s ok to kill a baby in cases of rape or incest, then it’s not really a baby. This is also why those at odds with us find graphic images so infuriating, because it squarely brings into focus a burnt-into-your-brain depiction of what we’re really talking about here- a human life in high definition.
Yes, a 10-year-old or 11-year-old giving birth, almost certainly by C-section and almost certainly prematurely, would be traumatic. It would be undeniably, immeasurably painful and fearful; nearly too much to bear. But ending a life is also traumatic, particularly for the little one growing inside who is about to have his or her existence destroyed. What do we do with that pain? What do we say to that image of God growing insider her tiny womb? This is how we love them both, by not compounding and adding to the young girl’s anguish with the memory of a murder to one day haunt her.
The phrase “they’re taking a young girl to the clinic to get an abortion” should never come out of our mouth. Instead, we should say “they’re taking the young girl to destroy the child inside of her, using chemicals, curettes, and surgical steel to slice up the baby’s body and turn it into a slurry of blood and bone to be poured down the drain or tossed into a dumpster.”
This should be the standard and not the exception, thereby reclaiming language that never should have disappeared, and honoring the victims whose blood has been shed by the tens of millions.
