I think this is excellent.
The Cunctator wrote:
The debate over the handling of abortion language largely boils down to the postmodern dispute over the nature of bias in scientific language and thought. That is: the practice of science includes only that which is (potentially) confirmable or repeatable, rather than that which is inherently subjective or unconfirmable.
Medical terminology falls under the scientific rubric in that the terms have a precise practical meaning. The terminology excludes moral and personal weightings.
"Uterus", for example, is a more precise term than "womb", in that "uterus" only refers to the female organ, whereas "womb" is regularly used metonymically.
One can argue that using medical terminology to discuss medical practices is biased, because the terminology avoids the moral questions. That is the argument used by those who say that we need to describe abortion issues using words such as "birth canal" or "partial-birth abortion", and who say that when we discuss medical practice the moral issues must be admixed.
Delirium wrote: " Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by the anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a moral issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical terms is seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community."
From that he concludes that we need to somehow intermix the terminology
in order to construct a neutral article.
But that conclusion is fallacious, as the "moralist" and "medicalist" arguments are not equivalent ones that cancel each other out, leaving perfect neutrality. Medical terms have specific, objective meaning, but non-medical terms do not.
Considering both Wikipedia's mission and Wikipedia's methods, having a bias towards scientific (objective, confirmable, empirical, etc.) language and methods in constructing articles is right and (I believe) necessary.
If we do not use specific, empirical language, we cannot express confirmable statements. We will instead use sentences that muddle meaning and issues. This fails Wikipedia's mission and leads to a breakdown in Wikipedia's methods, as the hammerings of multiple authors will not lead inexorably to one result.
Another way of putting the same idea: Wikipedia needs to be biased towards language based on consensual thought, such as scientific language, because Wikipedia is a consensual product.
A specific recommendation for the article at hand: the discussion of the medical procedures and the political debate about the medical procedures need to be mde distinct.
One thing this means is that the language of anti-abortion proponents can't be used to describe the medical procedures, as that language expressly disallows such a distinction.
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