Choking on Rights Talk

COMMENTARY: How do we rebuild a public space where truth-telling prevails over euphemism?

In her prescient book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of the language of “rights” as a rhetorical intensifier in campaigns to promote this, that, or the other thing: things that the Founders and Framers would never have imagined to be “rights.”

“Rights talk,” Professor Glendon cautioned, sets the individual against the community, as it privileges personal autonomy – “I did it myway” – over the common good. And that, she concluded, was going to be very bad for the American experiment in ordered liberty over the long haul.

The long haul has now arrived. And the results are every bit as bad as Glendon predicted.

Nowhere has this descent into verbal incontinence created as malodorous a public stench as in the profligate use of the self-contradictory phrase “reproductive rights.” What can that term possibly mean if we’re not in Alice’s Wonderland? “Reproductive rights” is a euphemism for abortion. Elective abortion is the willful destruction of a human being at an early stage of his or her development. How can the destruction of that human being — whose biological humanity is affirmed in high school textbooks – be a matter of exercising a reproductive right when the process in question is intended to end reproduction by expulsion from the womb or fetal dismemberment?

Continued below.