At 11:24 AM 10/28/03 -0800, Delirium wrote:
Eileen wrote:
I also note the use of "birth canal" to describe the vagina as if a woman had an exit chute on her baby factory; and the use of "womb" in place of 'uterus'. Both these terms, and the misstatement of the time the procedure is performed, lead me to believe the article was mainly written by somebody opposed to abortion who was more interested in getting a subtle message out then actually providing honest information. Since we are describing a medical procedure appropriate medical/biological terminology which is well understood by the general population is the appropriate vocabulary.
May I suggest reading this article before using the term "PBA" as loosely as it is used in your current entry. http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/499/
In both these cases, the problem is that there is no entirely neutral terminology. 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. My preferred solution would be to use both sets of terms interchangeably--both "womb" and "uterus" and both "birth canal" and "vagina/cervix/vulva"). In particular I don't really see anything wrong with "birth canal", and have seen it used in pro-abortion literature as well as anti-abortion literature.
Womb is a fine old English word, uterus is medical Latin. Both are perfectly acceptable.
There is little or no "pro-abortion literature": those of us who support abortion rights also support the rights of women to have children if they wish--and, in fact, part of the fight for reproductive freedom is an ongoing battle against forced sterilization. If you're trying for neutrality, don't use one side's terminology for the other.
As for the term "Partial Birth Abortion" itself, there's no good solution to that either that I can see. Certainly there some be some discussion about the controversy over terminology, but simply adopting an alternate term would be biased as well. The only other term in reasonably widespread use is "late term abortion", but as you pointed out some of these procedures do not actually occur in the last trimester, so can't really fall under that heading. So I'd say keeping the term PBA with the qualification that some abortion supporters object to the term is the best solution.
There is a legitimate medical term for this procedure, which goes back to before the anti-choice movement politicized it: intact dilation and extraction. That some people haven't heard the term doesn't mean we can't use it.
What I think we should do is use the medical term, and note that some abortion opponents prefer to call it by a recently-invented term that makes better anti-abortion propaganda.