Sunday, April 23, 2006

A language proposal

Chuffing Tiger suggests taking the "ZEF" term used by abortion rights advocates to dehumanize the unborn entity, and using it as an adjective: "ZEF people".

Personally, I think just "ZEF" is fine. It covers all stages of prenatal development, it doesn't drag any sentimentality in, and it doesn't reduce the unborn to a consumer good the way "product of conception" does. (Though really, we're all ultimately products of conception. If anybody out there isn't notify the New England Journal of Medicine and the National Enquirer.)

After all, how many arguments bog down over just trying to come up with an exceptable term to label the entity destroyed in an abortion? Even the word "entity" gets you into debates with ardent abortion advocates who insist that until the uterine occupant draws breath, it's just a freefloating collection of cells.

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