Politics

CARRIE SHEFFIELD: Here’s How Liberal Media Is Dehumanizing Unborn Children

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Mankind’s capacity for extreme cruelty starts with dehumanizing the intended target. For example, liberal Sunny Hostin, a co-host of “The View,” recently compared white women voting Republican to ”roaches voting for Raid.”

Hostin dehumanizing one target group is far from an isolated case in world history. UCLA professor Aliza Luft writes, “Hutu extremists who organized the Rwandan genocide called Tutsi cockroaches and snakes. Moreover, dehumanization is fourth on the list of the ‘Ten Stages of Genocide’ developed by Professor Gregory Stanton.”

Now we have the Associated Press continuing the Orwellian language fray by dehumanizing unborn children by altering the language journalists use to describe developing children and the people who fight for them.

Supposedly the AP is making these changes to be more neutral and accurate, though it’s clear this liberal-slanting organization is anything but. The AP announced on Dec. 6 that it aims to ban the use of the phrases “late-term abortion” and “heartbeat bills.”

Proponents often use the phrase “heartbeat bill” to describe policies that prevent abortion following fetal heartbeats, often around six weeks.

“Advanced technology can detect a flickering as early as six weeks, when the embryo isn’t yet a fetus and it has only begun forming a rudimentary heart,” the AP Stylebook now states. “The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it is not accurate to call that a heartbeat. Use the term cardiac activity instead.”

Translation: according to these progressive ideologues, a “rudimentary heart” is not actually a heart. An unborn child’s central organ to provide life-giving blood is written off by the flick of a pen. It is sterile “cardiac activity” rather than a beating human heart.

This is no shock, of course, given the left-leaning tilt of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which donates to pro-abortion candidates by nearly a 3-to-1 margin. What should shock Americans is the abortion extremism of the Left. Six U.S. states plus the District of Columbia do not have any state-level restrictions on when an abortion can take place — meaning fully formed babies can be killed in the womb until birth.

This puts these states — Oregon, New Jersey, Vermont, New Mexico, Alaska, and Colorado — in line with the abortion policies of China and North Korea.

The existence of these late-term abortions contradicts the AP’s Dec. 6 instructions that “late-term abortion” should be stricken from journalists’ notebooks. AP claims that abortion “does not happen” after 41 weeks; however, this procedure is legal in these six states at any point in pregnancy, which includes late-term. That means these babies can be killed up until birth, even though they would survive outside the womb.

The AP Stylebook previously said journalists should avoid the term “pro-life” when writing about abortion and replace it with “anti-abortion” or “anti-abortion rights.” This handbook is used as the grammar Bible for thousands of media outlets, reaching billions of people around the world.

If there is no human life at stake, as the AP claims, then it’s so much easier to snuff out an inconvenient “clump of cells,” a phrase not mandated by the AP in this case but often used by pro-abortion activists to dehumanize unborn children.

The AP Stylebook orders journalists to “use the modifiers anti-abortion or abortion-rights; don’t use pro-life, pro-choice or pro-abortion unless they are in quotes or proper names. Avoid abortionist, which connotes a person who performs clandestine abortions.”

Banning the phrase “pro-life” and mandating a shift away from “pro-choice” and “pro-abortion” to “abortion-rights” is a false narrative. The Supreme Court, in its June Dobbs ruling, correctly noted that there is no right to end the life of an unborn child. The AP automatically puts pro-life activists in a defensive position as someone fighting a supposed “right” that does not exist in the United States.

These linguistic shifts over time by the AP will have detrimental impacts on the fight to defend innocent life in the womb. The power of language is undeniable, as the Left colludes with Big Tech to curtail, cancel and shadow ban voices that don’t parrot prescribed phrases and narratives.

Fair journalists reporting accurately on the pro-life and pro-choice movements should report the truth about progressive abortion extremism and reject these false language mandates from the Associated Press and the media elites.

Carrie Sheffield is the Director of the Center for American Values at America First Policy Institute.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.