Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Ah, but "a woman's right to choose" makes a much more effective slogan than "the right of a mother to kill her own baby".
Tarquin wrote it's not a "baby" until it is born.
The only trouble, Tarquin, is that that is a point of view. Some people in their language distinguish between what the call an 'unborn baby' (or pre-birth baby) and 'post-birth baby'. Accepting the argument of /either/ side, that abortion is a right or abortion is wrong, that a woman has a right to choose or a foetus has a right to live, violates Wikipedia's NPOV policy.
The nightmare with the abortion debate is that right the way through it you have two diametrically opposed theories on rights, on life and on language. That divergence is implicit even in the two key words of the protagonists; 'life' and 'choice', implying that the other side are 'anti-choice' or 'anti-life'. The biggest problem of all is that /both/ sides imply the existence of absolutes where they don't exist. The 'right to life' isn't absolute; society accepts that sometimes the taking of life is acceptable in some extreme circumstances, (hence armies, executions, etc.) Nor is there simply a 'right to choose', as society operates on the principle of the right to restrict choice; libel and defamation laws deny the 'right to choose' to say what you want; laws deny a 'right to choose' to kill someone except in extreme cases; laws deny people the 'right to choose' to discriminate on the basis of gender, race, orientation etc etc. So both sides speak of absolute /rights/ in society that should be reflected in abortion, in a spin that deliberately hides the fact that even if one accepts that a foetus has a right to life, it doesn't mean an /absolute/ right to life, that even if women have a right to choose in many areas, it does not automatically mean a right to choose the continuation or termination of a pregnancy.
Society /chose/ to define a right of choice as applying in the area of pregnancy, a 'right' of choice denied in many other areas of society. Some believe in that instance it was a right that deserved to be awarded. Others argued that in that area, like others, no such right should exist.
Wikipedia has to be careful in dealing with a complex issue like abortion not to accept, in implicit or explicit language, that one or other side of the argument is /of course/ right and to understand the underlying principles and perspectives that shape both sides of this divisive and controversial debate. The only trouble is that if one takes out the loaded terminology of both sides, is there actually language that is agenda-neutral? Even the medical community, depending on its views on the issue, loads phrases with meanings to support their agenda, in the view of one side 'sanitising' the procedure, in the view of the other 'emotionally loading' the procedure, a case in point being whether one can use 'partial birth abortion' without appearing anti-abortion/pro-life. But as many wikipedians in the past experienced, any attempt to neutralise terminology in the abortion article can at best lead one to be attacked by whichever side feel the language being removed told the 'truth' (ie, /their/ side of the article, or at worst leading to attacks from both sides who revert any changes because the article isn't pro-choice/pro-life enough in a neutral form, if one could find a neutral form.
No wonder one of the first bits of advice I got when I joined wikipedia was to feel free to edit anything /but the abortion article/, the longstanding wikipedian telling me that touching that article was the ultimate nightmare, with "bigoted fanatics" (her words) standing guard like centurions over it, screaming 'right to life'/'right to choose' rants if a comma was out of place, lest a comma in some sentence be seen to be a 'pro-life' comma or a 'pro-choice' comma, ie that one wrongly placed commas would lead the fanatics on both sides to see a hidden agenda in the edit and accuse you of 'defending baby murdering' or 'attacking women's rights'.
While wikipedia has many strengths, I doubt if any open edit sourcebook /can/ achieve NPOV on this topic with so many people passionately biased on the topic, convinced that their side are /of course/ right, and determined to use abortion as a plank in a wider ideological debate, whether it is the 'decline of the family' or the 'undermining of the liberation of women'. Abortion I fear is one topic that is beyond wikipedia, and has the potential to place rows of the name of Gdansk, Mother Teresa, anti-semitism, the Middle East and everything else in the halfpenny place, making them look like minor, easy to heal squabbles compared to the dreaded, divisive and daunting a-word, 'abortion'.
JT
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