National Public Radio's supervising senior standards and practices editor Mark Memmott recently published a "guidance reminder" instructing the non-profit media organization's employees in how to frame abortion news.  Memmott wrote:

The term 'unborn' implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They're fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a 'baby' or 'the unborn' is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion.

That is simply a bald-faced lie.

Memmott added: "NPR doesn't use the term 'abortion clinics.'  We say instead, 'medical or health clinics that perform abortions.'  The point is to not to use abortion before the word clinic.  The clinics perform other procedures and not just abortions."  Memmott also cautioned staffers not to use terms such as "fetal heartbeat," "partial birth" and "late-term abortion," because they are terms often used by scary, radical, right-wing extremists who oppose abortion.

Incredibly, Memmott claims that the memo will help NPR be "precise, accurate and neutral" when discussing abortion.  Telling your talent (and that is a relative term here) that they should not use the terms "baby" and "unborn" when referring to what is inside a pregnant woman is not accurate or neutral.  It is certifiable.  Is it a shoe?  No.  An amorphous blob?  No.  Is it alive?  Yes.  So is it a duckling?  No.  A piglet?  No.  For God's sake, then, stop refusing to call a baby a baby!  (This is much of the reason why the NPRs of the world won't stop doing just that.)

Doctors and nurses describe "how your baby grows and develops" during the first — and each subsequent — trimester for parents who are expecting.  They do not typically refer to "your fetus."  During ultrasounds, nurses don't point to the screen and say, "Look at that thing there, your fetus is a boy!"  (Nor do they say, "I'm arbitrarily assigning the gender 'boy' to your fetus.")

It is repulsive that taxpayer-funded NPR goes to these extremes to slant its coverage of a "life and death" issue (to quote Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand), and it is yet another example of the making of fake news.  Leftists have always engaged in the corruption of language to entice, deceive, and coerce the dull and unwary.  Hence "illegal alien," a factually correct term, becomes the inane "undocumented immigrant."  Those who wish to be a member of the opposite sex simply have to say that they are, and, voilà, they are "transgendered."  Yet pro-abortion progressives attempt to dehumanize small humans by labeling them as "fetuses" or "non-viable tissue masses."  

A baby is a fetus, though he looks like a baby and functions like a baby and has a beating heart (I mean an "embryonic pulsing," to quote a recent article in the New York Times), two arms, two legs, and a pair of eyes?  Even though he is an inch or two from being outside the womb, and even though as soon as he makes it outside the womb, he magically turns into a..."baby"?  If a fetus is born weeks — or even months — early, he instantaneously and miraculously morphs into a "baby"?  Must be the air.

What if what NPR calls a fetus identifies as a baby?  What then?  Huh?  How do you handle that, Mark Memmott?

Those who supported slavery and those who support abortion share the vehement belief in dehumanizing those they don't consider equals.  The Three-Fifths Compromise of the early days of the republic had slaves counted as three fifths of a human being.  Though it sounds horrible, in reality, this was done to lessen the power of the slave states and help bring about the abolition of slavery.  Should there be a Three-Fifths Compromise with pro-abortion types?  If they agree to consider "fetuses" as at least three fifths of a human being, they'd be closer to a moral position than they are now.

All slaves were babies at one time.  Thank God that not all babies grow up to be slaves.