EDITORIAL/‘Pro-choice’ censorship
In defining what a “euphemism” is, if a dictionary wanted to cite an example, the term “pro-choice” could well serve as Exhibit A and Big Data is out of hand.
A euphemism is “a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.”
That’s basically how “pro-abortion” became “pro-choice.”
For the pro-abortion left, the “choice” in “pro-choice” is a euphemism, because it almost always ends in abortion.
That’s why, when “pro-choice” extremists on and off Capitol Hill speak of “the right to choose,” notice that they seldom, if ever, complete the sentence grammatically with the direct object of the verb “choose” — that is, abortion — added to the phrase.
Pro-abortion extremists appear not to want any other “choice” (aka option) offered to women with unplanned pregnancies, such as material and financial help and moral and spiritual support that might encourage and enable them to carry their pregnancies to term.
How else would one explain why a group of 21 Senate and House Democrats would write a June 17 letter to the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to urge the search engine behemoth to suppress search results for pro-life pregnancy resource centers that offer alternatives to abortion (again, aka choices) to women facing unplanned pregnancies?
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and 19 other Democratic would-be censors wrote, urging Google to “limit the appearance” of, or add “user-friendly disclaimers” to, pro-life clinics in users’ search results.
The Democrats said they want to “ensure women seeking health care services are directed to the basic information they request.” That information, if they had their way, would not include what they repeatedly refer to as “anti-abortion fake clinics, also known as ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ and ‘pregnancy resource centers.’”
Just because those clinics and centers don’t perform abortions, and instead seek to counsel women out of having them, doesn’t make pregnancy resource centers “fake clinics.”
The name-calling is a hateful, mean-spirited attack on the 3,000-plus centers coast to coast that helps women deal with unexpected and/or unwanted pregnancies with whatever they need — housing, food, diapers and baby clothes, baby furniture, counseling and more.
Pregnancy resource centers often operate on a shoestring budget and are typically staffed by volunteers, with no government funding. That would be very much unlike Planned Parenthood, which provides none of the above, yet receives hundreds of millions of dollars annually in federal, state and local government funding — and doubtless the adulation of those 21 Democrats.
The most recent pro-life help facility to be victimized by these radicals was the Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center in Lynchburg, Virginia, which was tagged with hateful graffiti and had several windows shattered early Saturday morning.
It’s not accidental, by the way, that the letter writers targeted Google in their bid to “disappear” pregnancy resource centers. According to Statista.com, as of January, the Mountain View, California, tech titan held a commanding 85.5% desktop market share of the search engine business worldwide. (Bing was a distant second at 7.6%.)
Pro-life pregnancy centers deserve a fair shot and Big Data censorship needs reform.