A G K Y R A

I read a post yesterday in which the author thoughtfully reasons through the question of whether pro-lifers are really pro-life or just anti-choice. He concludes that many, if not all, pro-lifers are really anti-choice. I won’t now go into his argument for that (you can read it, and my comment in response, if you care), but do want to take up the question of what terms we should use to refer to the sides in the abortion debate. Is it a debate between pro-abortion people, on the one hand, and anti-choicers, on the other? Or perhaps the anti-abortion side and the anti-life side?

Here are some reasons we should get away from all this terminological silliness and stick to good old-fashioned “pro-life” and “pro-choice” as ways to refer to the two sides in the debate:

1. The abortion debate is about both life and choice. The two sides in the debate have different main concerns that meet up in the question of legal abortion. The pro-choice side is primarily concerned about–you guessed it–choice, by which they mean protecting the legal right of a woman to have an abortion. The pro-life side is primarily concerned about protecting the rights and lives of the unborn. Naturally, each side’s arguments focus on persuading people about the importance of that side’s main concern, so the pro-life side really is best characterized as “pro-life,” and the pro-choice side as “pro-choice.”

2. Therefore, to characterize either side as “anti” this or that is to distort that side’s arguments and primary concern. It isn’t as though pro-choicers are “anti-life” in general, or that they’re pro-abortion. Obviously, pro-lifers aren’t anti-choice as a general proposition. Pro-choicers don’t usually like to argue about the life of the unborn because that’s not the issue in their view, nor do pro-lifers think that subsidiary legal rights are germane when fundamental rights are in jeopardy (the “right to life” movement).

3. “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” are not loaded terms. They’re not rhetorically loaded because they’re widely used and widely understood, which means that they don’t draw attention to themselves and don’t get people upset. After their long history, they are practically technical terms, so using them doesn’t imply any value judgment. They simply identify which party in the debate is being referred to. Get it? They’re terms of reference. Clear and non-distracting terms of reference are an important element in clear communication and substantive debate.

4. “Anti-Life” or “Anti-Choice” or other terms are rhetorically loaded. Let me give you two reasons. First, they’re loaded because they’re not common and thus draw attention to themselves. Second, they describe one side from the perspective of the other. Pro-lifers only look anti-choice if you’re in the pro-choice camp. If you use these loaded terms, you have identified yourself as a partisan, and you’re calling people names. Apart from being not nice, it doesn’t contribute anything substantive to the debate, and what’s more, insofar as it distracts or inflames the participants, it actually detracts from the substance of the debate.

5. “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” as a pair are the only neutral terms. Editors and journalists, you need to print this out and add it to your style guide right now. The only way to be neutral in your writing is not to choose sides. The only way not to choose sides is to refer to each side using its own preferred term. Whatever you do, you must not refer to one side using the other side’s preferred term for its opponents. For the pro-life position, that means you ought to refer to it as “pro-life,” and likewise with the pro-choice side. To use “anti-choice” or “pro-abortion” or similar is explicitly to take a side in the debate (see Abortion in the Movies, Advocacy in the Newspaper).

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The New York Times yesterday had an article by Mireya Navarro called “On Abortion, Hollywood Is No-Choice.” The jumping off point of her essay are the two recent movies “Waitress” and “Knocked Up,” both of which follow characters facing an unwanted pregnancy. In both cases, Navarro argues, the movies “go out of their way to sidestep real life,” because more than half of all unwanted pregnancies end in abortion, whereas the word “abortion” is never uttered by either character in these movies.

In the rest of the article, Navarro selects quotes that explain why movies and television rarely, if ever, deal with the subject of abortion, and even then do it very gingerly. Abortion is a touchy subject that could alienate audiences and sponsors, and after all, “Hollywood wants to entertain and make money.”

I’m not one to run around talking about “the liberal media” or anything like that, and I have no idea what Ms. Navarro’s political views are, at least not on other issues. On this issue, however, her personal opinion comes across clearly as she argues her case using a montage of quotations. What good would all my training in redaction criticism be if I couldn’t turn my critical eye toward newspaper commentators from time to time?

I doubt that Ms. Navarro would prefer to think of herself as a commentator, and the piece appeared in the Style section, not Opinion. But even though the piece has the look-and-feel of news reporting–short paragraphs, an impersonal and objective-sounding voice, lots of quotations–nevertheless, Ms. Navarro has a thesis that she argues for in the subtext. It is evident from her redactional choices as she selected which quotes to use and how to incorporate them into the overall structure of her piece, and in the few evaluative words that are directly her own.

Her thesis is that producers of movies and television programs are ethically wrong for caving to social and financial pressure not to portray abortion more frequently and more positively, as it is in reality.

The most telling clue about her own personal opinion is her decision to use the terms “anti-abortion” and “anti-choice” when describing, in her own voice, the view of pro-lifers. The truly neutral decision would have been to use the term “pro-life,” since that is the most common term and any positive connotation it might once have had has been leached out from frequent use. “Pro-choice” is the corresponding neutral term to refer to the contrary view, and it has also lost any positive connotation. “Pro-life” and “pro-choice” have become technical terms, not euphemisms, and not propagandizing words. “Anti-abortion,” and “anti-choice,” however, reflect the viewpoint of only one side in the debate, the pro-choice side. Only someone pro-choice refers to the other party as “anti-abortion” or as “anti-choice.” Can you just imagine if an editor allowed an article in which the pro-choice position were referred to as “anti-life” or “pro-abortion.”

Even more revealing is the fact that she uses “anti-choice” to describe how “conservative bloggers” have described one of the movies since the character doesn’t seek an abortion. Let me get this straight. Conservative bloggers, by which I assume she means pro-life bloggers, have been describing a movie in which abortion isn’t depicted as … ANTI-CHOICE? It seems more likely that conservative bloggers would be depicting the movie as sympathetic to the pro-life view. From Ms. Navarro’s point of view, however, that equates to anti-choice, which is then how she represents it in her argument. Moreover, the pro-choice position is described in quote (that frames part of the article) as “women’s reproductive freedom.”

So Ms. Navarro has uttered a shibboleth that identifies her as a pro-choice partisan. What are some other redactional clues to her subtextual argument?

First, she tries to anchor the piece in objectivity by giving statistics about abortion: two-thirds of all unwanted pregnancies end in abortion. That’s just reality, and so we should expect that movies would somehow reflect that. Undoubtedly, for many readers this positive statement about statistical reality will be transmogrified into a normative proposition that movies ought to reflect reality (never mind what that would imply for science fiction, spy thrillers, or romantic comedies).

Is it just that Hollywood shies away from controversial topics? No, otherwise Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ wouldn’t have been released. What is it then? It comes down to money. Abortion could alienate audiences and, in the case of television, sponsors, and that would translate into lower profits, so naturally producers take a hard line against portraying abortion. As examples, she points to a cable program that was canceled because of its treatment of abortion, and how Fox “vetoed” a television episode on Party of Five on the same subject, which is described as a “cop out.” Abortion would have provided “incredible, rich material that happened in real life.” Note how she reinforces the idea that abortion is statistically common and thus should be portrayed in movies and television.

What it all amounts to, the article argues, is that an “extremely active and vocal minority” (the pro-life position) are cowing television and movie executives into suppressing abortion as a topic for (!) entertainment. The pressure that this powerful minority exerts is reflected in the ginger treatment of abortion on Grey’s Anatomy and even Sex in the City. General Hospital last year portrayed a woman having an abortion, but even in that case, they presented the opposing viewpoint in the story. The actress who portrayed the woman who had an abortion says that “women who have been able to go on with their life without feeling evil” after an abortion aren’t portrayed on television.

The final quote sums up everything that came before. Hollywood won’t portray the reality of abortion because they want to make money. Shame on them.

If you read the article, and I hope you do, it probably won’t read the way I’m describing it. It’s not intended to. It’s not in the Opinion section, and Ms. Navarro doesn’t argue in her own voice or on her own behalf. Journalism holds out objectivity as an ideal and relies on simple description to communicate the news to readers so that they can be informed and formulate their own judgments. To serve those purposes, journalists suppress much of their stylistic and evaluative voice in their writing. There is an air of objectivity in news writing. It corresponds to the way news reporters on television and radio modulate their voice differently than people ordinarily do when speaking. They’re trained to do that (and have to practice it over and over!) because it masks the ordinary emotional signals of spoken communication that would reveal the reporter’s own view about whatever is being talked about, but without flattening out speech into a monotone.

I want people to be more careful readers than they are, especially with the news media, where unwary readers can easily be manipulated in their views precisely because they don’t realize that someone is trying to manipulate them. Don’t let the objective and impersonal tone of voice, the news reporter voice you will hear in your head, blind you to the argument being advocated. Look carefully at the quotes and how they’re arranged so as to carry the reader along on a train of thought. It’s not merely (or perhaps not even?) a collection of facts.

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