Example #3,527,104 of the verbal duplicity of the culture of death

From Newsbusters, (ht: The Corner) a quote from a piece about an ABC "World News Sunday" story focusing on "doctors"/abortionists:

LeRoy Carhart, a Nebraska abortionist and the plaintiff in Gonzales v. Carhart, the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, offered a description of late-term abortion, "It's very much a three day, four day, even five day procedure. And in our procedure, after the first day, the fetus is no longer alive. So it's really a miscarriage of a stillborn fetus."

Yeah, right. And poisoning your boss's drink leads to a "preemptive involuntary heart failure", shoving your spouse over a cliff results in "inconvenient gravitationally-motivated brain function cessation," and firing an 8-gauge shotgun into the mailman's belly brings about an unfortunate case of "shell shock" (more accurately, "pellet shock" or "shot shock"). Empty, deadly words.

Related books available from Ignatius Press:

• Confronting the Language Empowering the Culture of Death, by William Brennan
• Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, by Josef Pieper
• Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Comments

[Kevin]

"[T]he fetus is no longer alive"? Sounds like an inadvertent admission to me.

[LJ]

And in our procedure, after the first day, the fetus is no longer alive.

Notice the passive expression, "no longer alive" which fails to mention that the baby was alive before he started his "procedure" and it was his "procedure" that killed it. Ergo, he killed the baby in the first day of the "procedure."

I wonder if it is just for public consumption or does this double-talk actually help to ease their own conscience? It is beyond my understanding that such people could actually do what they do, much less sit in a hearing and try to justify it.

[Ed Peters]

They won't end up in Hell, of course. Just somewhere that isn't Heaven and isn't Purgatory and isn't annihilation.

[M. L. Hearing]

Brings to mind Orwell, of course, and Josef Pieper's Abuse of Language-Abuse of Power, which I just read last week. And here's the passage from Pieper's book I first thought of when I read the Nebraska abortionist's statement:

"Public discourse itself, separated from the standard of truth, creates on its part, the more it prevails, an atmosphere of epidemic proneness and vulnerability to the reign of the tyrant."

M. L. Hearing