Euphemisms for ‘Ban’

Recorded:
Oct 2023
Speaker
Dr. Sarah Prager
Duration
00:01:32
AUDIO CLIP
TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Sarah Prager: So right now, one of the pushes from the anti-choice people is to not use the word ‘ban’ because they have figured that even in their conservative, banned states, people don’t like the word ‘ban.’ So, they’re talking about reasonable limitations, they’re using all kinds of euphemisms, and they’re not saying ban. And the media is going along with it or putting ‘ban’ in quotations. And that is really, really dangerous, and it also sets up this false equivalency in other ways. So I read a piece by David Leonhardt, who does a summary every morning [“The Morning” newsletter, The New York Times], and he was saying, “Some things just are true, like climate change is happening,” and I don’t know what other thing he said. “And other things, there’s a lot of room for debate,” and he named abortion as one of those things. And I actually emailed him, and I was like, “You’re setting up the exact same thing about abortion that existed for three decades around climate change.” 98 percent of all of the actual good science supports that abortion is safe, supports that abortion saves pregnant people’s lives, supports that any ban on abortion access is dangerous and only makes care worse, and I named a bunch of the things that was inaccurate about that, and I was like, “You can have whatever opinion you want, but if you’re talking about facts, the facts are actually not disputable.”

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