Abortuary
If
you are concerned at the high number of abortions that take place in
this country and elsewhere you will immediately recognise the point
being made in the term ‘abortuary’. Coined in the late 1980s the
term is used to refer to an abortion clinic and amalgamates the words
abort
and
mortuary.
The
purpose is to emphasise that every time an abortion is performed a
death results. As much as any mortuary, an abortion clinic is a place
of death. Unlike a mortuary, however, the deaths of babies in
abortion clinics are all preventable.
An
anti-abortion or pro-life group called the Prolife
action league is
much in favour of this sort of emotive language. In a series of 99
things you can do about abortion they include use of ‘inflammatory
rhetoric’. Most of the language they have in mind would only be
‘inflammatory rhetoric’ to pro-abortionists. For example, ‘baby’
rather than foetus, foetal tissue or the outrageous POC (‘product
of conception’) and ‘mother’ rather than ‘pregnant woman’ and ‘killing a baby’
rather than ‘interrupting a pregnancy’.
Some doctors object to
being known as abortionists. American doctor, Robert Tamis, is an
example named by another organisation. He wants to be known as a
‘fertility specialist’ but what many women who seek his help do
not realise is that, despite his efforts to help them conceive at
other times in the week, on Tuesday and Saturday he kills
approximately 20 babies a morning.
Christians
are well used to this reticence. Many have a distaste for terms like
fornication or adultery and prefer ‘pre-marital sex’ or ‘having
an affair’. Perhaps terms like ‘pro-life’ and ‘abortuary’
are inflammatory. The Pro-life
action league recognises
that constant use of such terms can be counter-productive.
Nevertheless such terms can be useful in shocking people into
realising what is going on.
Other
terms for abortion clinics include ‘Death camp’ and ‘Abortion
mill’. The word ‘holocaust’ has often been applied to the whole
sorry spectacle of mass death that characterises the twentieth century abortion industry. Such terms emphasise that just as under
Hitler a mechanistic, conveyor belt approach to death existed, so,
perhaps for the first time in history, abortionists take the same
cold, ruthless line with unwanted babies today.
We
cannot condone attacks on abortionists and abortion clinics and we
may see little point in ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ but we cannot
close our eyes to what is going on. Every day in cardboard boxes
marked ‘Medical Services - Regulated Medical Waste’ or something
similar, mangled,
bloody bodies and torn limbs from tiny babies are taken across town
to be incinerated.
Can we have any sympathy at all for a man like Henry Morgentaler who
alone has been personally responsible for some 100,000 abortions in
Canada, a man who can say ‘I’m quite proud of this accomplishment
... This is my calling in life, it’s my art … I should be given a
medal for the compassionate service I have performed for women in
this country’!?
Rather are our sympathies not rather with American
Joe Scheidler who says, ‘We
live in a sick nation whose highest court legalised child murder,
whose medical profession commits the carnage, whose government
approves of it, whose legal system defends it, whose legislatures
pass laws to protect it … and whose journalists have consistently
conducted a program of silence and misinformation regarding this
holocaust known as legal abortion.’
This article first appeared in Grace Magazine
