MountainSky Contents

Most Recent

Feticide -- the killing of a child during the fetal stage of life -- is a specific type of homicide, like regicide (killing a king), tyrannicide (killing a tyrant), and genocide (killing of all the people in an ethnic group). The word feticide is used infrequently in American journalism, not because the crime is rare -- a million and a half children are victims of feticide every year in the U.S. -- but because the word is an unauthorized synonym for abortion. Chatterjee's story is unusual in that it includes a quote which shows that feticide and abortion can be used interchangeably: "female feticide" and "female fetuses are aborted" are two ways of referring to the same thing.

Can feticide happen in America? The answer is, clearly, yes. But now for a nice follow-up question: Can feticide be reported in America as feticide? 

In a limited way, yes. Here, and many other places on the Net, as well as in books and magazines, there are writers who eschew the euphemisms which obscure what it is the abortionists are really doing. Ponder for a minute and you'll see that the word abortion itself has become a kind of euphemism -- it moves the force of  the action from the child to the mother, it ignores the child, and it carries a scrubbed, clinical nuance which doesn't include violence or death. So, at MountainSky, the word abortion is generally avoided, unless it occurs in quoted material.  But the impact of MountainSky is not significant in the wider realm of journalism (there are some who would say that writing columns and publishing them on an obscure website as a hobby isn't even journalism!). Heavy-weight journalism -- the AP, Reuters, the daily newspapers and the news magazines, television and public radio... -- will not sanction the word "feticide" because this word focuses attention not on the woman who is physically violated by the abortionist, but on the abortionist's victim. Feticide is a word that has nothing of the antiseptic "medical procedure" nuance of the word abortion. To use  feticide would be to suggest that a crime is committed when a child is killed by an abortionist, and most of the heavy-weight journalists rigidly avoid making any such suggestion.

You won't often see the word feticide at MountainSky. The reason is partly that feticide is a bit archaic, but also that it tends, like the word homicide, to be morally ambiguous. There is homicide which is justified for some reason -- that is, it is not properly synonymous with murder. When a soldier kills in battle, it is homicide, but it isn't murder. When someone attacks a woman and she shoots him to death, that is homicide, but not murder. The word feticide bears a trace of the moral neutrality of the the word homicide, notwithstanding the fact that feticide is a kind of homicide which is murder, almost by definition, because the victim is a helpless child. Also, feticide is a technical word, like the word fetus. The word fetus has been promoted by proaborts (and mindlessly used by journalists) because it obscures the truth. They don't like child to be used for a child in his/her mother's womb because that allows questions to be phrased in ways they find too challenging: Should it be legal to kill children? Should professional child killers be incarcerated? Should a child be killed because she is female? Etc... When they can't escape into some nebulous abstraction like "a woman's reproductive health," proaborts would rather refer to a fetus expiring, or some such thing. At any rate, the word feticide has been undermined by the same attempt at verbicide which has impacted the word fetus.

Verbicide? The killing of a word, right? The proaborts know that to defend the violent work of the abortionists, the killing of innocent children, language itself must be attacked. A permissive attitude toward feticide leads to verbicide. Verbicide can result in muddled thinking, and muddled thinking can lead to a permissive attitude toward anything, even murder.

Peter Barry 12/6/1999

Please send someone a link to this page.