President Obama's semantic gymnastics

Here's what we did not hear the president say in his campaign-style stem-winder on Wednesday night:

"The United States believes that access to safe, legal, and voluntary abortion is a fundamental right of all women. We proclaimed this at Cairo in 1995 and I affirm this right today. Last November, the American people chose a different course; they sent to Washington a president and a congressional majority strongly committed to the right to choose. We can respect differences and we can differ while maintaining our civility, but the people have spoken on this question---and I will honor their voice."

In his remarks before a joint session of Congress, the president eloquently called for greater civility in our public discourse---even while pledging to "call you out" if he thinks you are distorting the truth about his healthcare plan. But who will call him out?

The reason he did not say what the Clinton administration said at Cairo is because he knows that 51 percent of Americans call themselves pro-life and that 71 percent of Americans oppose forcing their neighbors to pay for abortion-on-demand as part of healthcare.

So he must engage in this charade: It's not in there, or, you won't have to pay for abortions . . . directly. But how about indirectly? California Medicine explained this process well in a famously pro-abortion editorial in 1970:

"[It] has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing which continues to be socially abhorrent. . . . The every considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not put forth under socially impeccable auspices. . . ."

President Obama's favorite recording artist, he tell us, is Ludacris. He has his music on his iPod. And there are no more "socially impeccable auspices" than a presidential address to Congress.

If Obama were really deleting from the major piece of liberal social legislation of that past half century a "fundamental right" of abortion, do you think the late Ted Kennedy would go along? Would Hillary Clinton have jumped up and down so often she seemed like a large red blur on most TV screens? Would the same members of Congress who vote to fund abortion-on-demand be leaping to their feet to applaud his every declarative sentence?

We do need civility in our public discourse. We need to let our ayes be ayes and our nays be nays. We need to stop the semantic gymnastics.

We need to restore respect for truth as we restore the right to life. They are closely---even intimately---related.

And this is no mere "distraction." The fate of 48 million human beings who had no healthcare because they lost their very lives before birth cannot be a minor issue.

We used to understand this better. In 1941, with a world at war, the Yearbook of Obstetrics and Gynecology upheld the highest standards of medical ethics. They editorialized about the unborn:

"At the present time, when rivers of blood and tears of innocent men, women and children are flowing in most parts of the world, it seems almost silly to be contending over the right to live of an unknowable atom of human flesh in the uterus of a woman. No, it is not silly. On the contrary, it is of transcendent importance that there be in this chaotic world one high spot, however small, which is safe against the deluge of immorality and savagery that is sweeping over us. That we, the medical profession, hold to the principle of the sacredness of human life and of the rights of the individual, even though unborn, is proof that humanity is not yet lost and that we may ultimately attain salvation."

They did not tell us they were "partners with God" in creating and destroying human lives. They held their craft in sacred honor. It was not above their pay grade. It should not be above ours.