I'm willing to bet that when my mom was a kid, or even when she and my dad were raising their four kids, they never used or heard the word “fetus.” A woman was expecting a “baby”, whether she was thrilled about it or not. The “baby” started kicking in the mom's womb around the sixth month. “So and so's having a baby,” they'd say. “Fetus” rarely, if ever, appeared outside medical books or biology texts. In fact, in my American College Dictionary, the one my bookstore proprietor aunt gave me in 1970 when I departed for university, “fetus” is defined as an embryology term.

How times have changed! Not so much among ordinary people, mind you. Pregnant women still talk about their coming baby. “The baby was kicking so much I couldn't sleep,” they'll say. Or their doctors will say, “The baby has a good strong heartbeat.” Neither of them refers to the “fetus.”

No, it's the hardcore pro-abortionists who have tried to turn the word into a commonly used, everyday word. The only people who comply, however, work in our country's media. They meticulously refer to the unborn baby as a “fetus” even if it means tripping over themselves in awkward sentences to avoid sounding like members of the “anti-choice” fringe. (It's okay to display bias towards pro-aborts by adopting their language. That's called moderation. It's the word “baby” that is judgmental and hateful.)

Take, for example, the Associated Press story in December about the horrific crime in which a Missouri woman, Lisa Montgomery, was accused of strangling an 8-months pregnant woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, and stealing her baby. The AP wire story said the woman was accused of “cutting out the fetus and taking the baby.”

San Antonio Express-News columnist Jonathan Gurwitz asked, “Was Stinnett pregnant with one child—the fetus—and Montgomery took another child—the baby? Or was there only one child involved and some transformative event occurred in the instant between being cut out and taken.”

Closer to home there was a little-noticed story out of BC in early December about Aimee Wilson, 8 months pregnant, who was involved in a car accident that killed her baby boy. Newspaper stories quoted Ms. Wilson saying of the person with whom she collided, “He killed my baby.” The paper would then go on to talk about the “fetus” as in “She and her boyfriend had named the fetus Garrett, and after it was removed by caesarian section, nurses dressed it and brought it to the couple so they could say goodbye.”

“It” was removed by caesarian section? Nurses dressed “it” and brought “it” to the couple so they could say goodbye? Do you suppose the nurses then said, “Here folks, do want to see it before we thrown it in the trash can?”

But, let's not just blame the media. Here's what Judith Doulis, a Vancouver human rights lawyer, had to say about the accident and suggestions that the Criminal Code should be amended to allow charges to be laid if a child in the womb is killed. That, she said “would open that whole murky snakepit of an area of abortions, and women's rights versus fetus rights.” She went on to add, “We know what had happened previously when it was a criminal offence to cause the death of a fetus. It resulted in a lot of deaths of women getting illegal abortions that were not safely performed.”

Please note the Ms. Doulis is a “human” rights lawyer. She seems, however, to restrict her definition of human to women. If little Garrett had been a Gail, would Ms. Doulis be more sympathetic. Or does calling the baby a “fetus” enable Ms. Doulis to ignore the humanity of the child?

As for the abortion law causing “a lot of deaths”, the only credible number based on actual records appeared in 1978 in the federal government's Badgley Report. It found that there were 12.3 deaths each year between 1958 and 1969. There are no other reliable statistics. In addition, most of the illegal abortions were performed by doctors, not unlike Henry Morgentaler, and they were paid for their services.

Lawyer Doulis further said that she “wouldn't like to see the change in the Criminal Code just because of the ramifications with respect to the effect on women and their long struggle for a sense of equality and ownership over their own body.”

And over the body of little Garrett? Aimee Wilson seemed pretty clear that her son should have had equal rights and that the car accident took his life not hers.

Police said that there would be charges laid against someone but they couldn't say if Aimee or the other driver was responsible for the accident. In any case, they cannot charge anyone for the death of Garrett, since the law does not consider him a “person”, until he proceeds alive from the body of his mother.

Ms. Doulis wondered if Aimee will still want charges if she is the one found at fault in the accident. “Would she want to be charged with manslaughter? If you're going to live by the sword you're going to die by the sword,” she said.

I guess in Ms. Doulis' view that's a lot worse than dying by a suction machine or forceps.