Pro-choice author and creator of the “I Had an Abortion” t-shirt project Jennifer Baumgardner describes an incident when she was speaking to a pro-choice group while she herself was pregnant:
“Along those lines, I had my own moment of truth during my fifth month of pregnancy in May 2004. A small moment, but it changed me. I was speaking to a group from Barnard’s College Students for Choice when I referred to the object in one’s uterus when one is pregnant as a “baby.”
A nurse practitioner who was speaking after me interrupted “Fetus, you mean. You said baby, but it’s a fetus.”
“Oh, right,” I stammered, blushing. “Oops.” I felt foolish, caught in an ignorant mistake. Later, though, I realized that I had always thought of my pregnancy as carrying a baby- that was the word I wanted to use- and I was forcing myself to say “fetus” out of fear. …I thought of other phrases that I forced myself to use too, like “so-called partial birth abortion” and “antichoice.” These phrases suddenly struck me as legal jargon, words in the service of arguments that weren’t themselves always meaningful. Suppressing language, policing ourselves so we don’t slip up and say “baby” continues the split between our politics and our lives.”
Jennifer Baumgardner “Abortion & Life” (New York, NY: Akashic Books, 2008) p 59-60
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