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What's in a name?
Labels are weapons in abortion debate
From Correspondent Bruce Morton
Scene from "Where are my children" 1.6M/30 sec. QuickTime movie
1.5M/27 sec. QuickTime movieWASHINGTON (CNN) -- Over the years, the abortion debate has become increasingly vocal and confrontational. It wasn't always that way. In the early days of film, use of the word "abortion" was taboo.
In the 1916 silent movie "Where Are My Children?" a young woman dies after a botched abortion. At the same time, the district attorney, who loves children, learns that his wife, who loves her social life, has had an abortion.
The word abortion is never used.
In the 1972 movie "A Place in the Sun," a year before Roe vs. Wade, Shelley Winters wants to have an abortion because her boyfriend won't marry her.
The doctor's advice: "Go home to your mother." He refuses to provide an abortion.
The word abortion is never spoken.
That same year, the television character Maude, pregnant and approaching 50, decides, along with her husband, to have an abortion.
The word is spoken once in the 30-minute episode -- and not when they make their decision.
Norman Lear, who produced the series "Maude," said there wasn't much public furor over the show. But he doesn't think today's reaction would be as docile.
"I have to believe, from everything I see, everything I know about television today, absolutely not," Lear said. "And everything I know about what is happening out there on the right and the religious right, and with that subject in the Congress, I would say, no."
Tagging the enemy
After the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, the abortion debate became more focused and public. Labels mattered -- a lot.
Anti-abortion groups refer to babies, not fetuses.
"I think one thing that has been continuous is our use of the term 'right to life,'" explained Darla St. Martin, associate director of the national anti-abortion group Right to Life.
"It is the name of our organization, Right To Life, and we have emphasized that aspect of it in the beginning and to continue to, because for us, that's the central question."
And St. Martin's label for the other side?
"Generally I say pro-abortion, because they are for legal abortion," she said.
But abortion-rights supporters want a different label: pro-choice.
Ad companies take sides
Herbert Gunther of Public Media Center has created advertisements for Planned Parenthood.
Commercial sponsored by the Arthur DeMoss foundation - 1.7M/32 sec. QuickTime movie Commercial by Planned Parenthood - 1.6M/30 sec. QuickTime movie "The other side, the religious extremists that would ban abortion under all circumstances, had rather successfully framed the issue in terms of pictures of healthy babies, smiling babies, and created this image that abortion was equal to killing babies, which is an extremely cynical and misleading image, as a lot of commercial advertising often is," Gunther said.
"Our purpose was to counter what was a very powerful agenda set by them. Who could be in support of baby-killers, who actually stand up and justify killing babies? No one. Certainly not the people who fought and defended a woman's right to choose."
Choice was an effective label. But the private Arthur DeMoss Foundation countered with ads that used choice in a different context.
The ads compared ultrasound pictures of a fetus with pictures of a child. Both can turn, jump and kick, the ad says, climaxing with the phrase: "Life: What a beautiful choice."
So the labels clang back and forth: coat-hanger abortions, baby-killers. Labels matter, as any pollster will tell you.
The most recent example was the debate over a bill in Congress that attempted to ban and criminalize a type of late-term abortion that anti-abortion activists labeled "partial-birth abortion."
"This atrocity permits jamming scissors into the back of the neck, opening the hole and suctioning the brain out," said Rep. Henry Hyde, a conservative Republican from Illinois.
"It's the entire fight -- to set the agenda," Gunther says.
That fight, that debate, is 25 years old now, and shows no signs of stopping.
Listen to Roe vs. Wade Oral Arguments / Read Full Text of the Decision
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