National Public Radio (NPR) is now resorting to the euphemism “aborting a pregnancy” rather than speak of aborting a fetus or a child.
“A 41-year-old woman is facing felony charges in Nebraska for allegedly helping her teenage daughter illegally abort a pregnancy,” NPR correspondent Martin Kaste wrote Friday.
Doubling down still more, Kaste added that “conversations showed the pregnancy had been aborted, not miscarried as the two had said.”
Needless to say, a woman does not carry or miscarry a pregnancy; she carries or miscarries a child.
As a point of comparison, Google defines “abort” as “carry out or undergo the abortion of (a fetus).” For its part, the Britannica Dictionary says the word means “to end a pregnancy deliberately by causing the death of the fetus.”
Lexico.com similarly defines abort as “carry out or undergo the abortion of (a fetus).”
Unabashedly pro-abortion, NPR is one of the mainstream media outlets that refers to the pro-life movement as the “anti-abortion-rights movement” or simply the “anti-abortion movement.”
According to NPR’s official abortion language policy:
On the air, we should use “abortion rights supporter(s)/advocate(s)” and “abortion rights opponent(s)” or derivations thereof (for example: “advocates of abortion rights”). It is acceptable to use the phrase “anti-abortion,” but do not use the term “pro-abortion rights.”
According to NPR’s public editor, the terms it uses are “largely apolitical, since neither side regularly uses those phrases, and thus NPR cannot be accused of adopting one side’s terminology over the other.”