The midterm elections are just weeks away. Many of the Democrat candidates are touting that they are for women’s “reproductive health care” and “the right to choose.” This is due to the not-too-distant Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision and the ensuing state actions to limit or enforce current abortion laws.

Given the fierce fight over this issue, can we all take a moment to consider the phrase “reproductive health care”? It’s rather benign, isn’t it?

Leave aside for the moment the word “reproductive.” The words “health care” basically denote a favorable, positive action; that is, taking care of one’s health Doctors might use antibiotics, chemo, radiation, or surgery to fight serious diseases. Setting or replacing broken or frail bones may be involved. Common to all such treatments are positive and proactive actions to encourage, enhance, and enrich good, vital health.

Now let’s return to the word “reproductive” health care. Here too, we think of efforts to promote a healthy life conducive to the reproductive organs or process. The most common usage, of course, relates to women only. But in a medical sense, men also possess a reproductive organ, area, and process. In their case, any medical action or treatment relates distinctly and only to their bodies. Some treatments could easily and rationally be termed “reproductive health care” also and considered favorable and positive.

Image: Pregnant woman and ultrasound by rawpixel.

For women, in the past, “reproductive health care” involved the favorable and positive care of their bodies to ensure their ability to become pregnant or to healthily carry a baby to term and birth. It involves medical attention and care over a nine-month period to ensure the mother’s good health and ability to thrive. It may involve vitamin supplementation, bed rest, tests, or other care to ensure the woman’s well-being.

True “reproductive health care” actually helps and supports both men and women despite its almost total focus on women only.

However,  when pregnancy is involved, “reproductive health care” involves another person’s body; that is, the body of a newly created human being called by different terms in its development stages, such as blastocyte, embryo, fetus, baby, or infant. Regardless of the stage of development, that new human being contains all the DNA it will possess throughout life. Genuine medical treatments involve ensuring it develops healthfully in its guarded, safe environment while nourished by its mother.

Thus far, we acknowledge “reproductive health care” to be positive, proactive, and totally favorable to a healthy outcome for all involved—especially for both mother and baby. Such positivity certainly encapsulates the word “care,” doesn’t it?

But there’s a subtle, euphemistic, horrific action added to “reproductive health care” for women that is not present in any other denoted “health care” area. Such action is treated benignly and benevolently by political candidates stating they are for women’s reproductive health care and choice. In this particular and specific case, it is a euphemism—a substituted pretense—for the word “care.” It’s the direct opposite of “care,” a word recognized for enhancing life—not ending it.

It’s abortion. The term abortion is medically and scientifically the word for miscarriage. But as it is understood and used primarily today, it is the taking of life, the execution of a living creature—another human being. It not only causes one to die, but it also causes death brutally, cruelly, and painfully. That little human being is painfully and brutally either poisoned, its skull cracked open and its brains sucked out, or dismembered.

Abortion is done on such a massive scale that it can be called mass murder or slaughter. The victims are innocent, vulnerable, and defenseless. Except for very rare instances, it’s done merely because it’s not wanted. He/she isn’t endangering the mother’s life and didn’t personally will the intrusion into her body. In other words, he/she is not personally responsible or guilty.

It’s beyond reason or reckoning that a civilized society could allow and even legalize such actions toward innocent human beings. We recognize and denounce the horrors of Nazi or Communist governments and nations against other people and yet remain indifferent, ignorant, or unmoved by our own nation’s current horror.

This is simply a cry to remember innocent victims when voting during the midterm elections. Which candidates favor mass slaughter, and which candidates favor protecting the most innocent and vulnerable? Our vote says a lot about our hearts as a people. It may lead to eventually ensuring genuine “reproductive health care” by saving many lives.