Curmudgeon alert: Say What You Mean!

Curmudgeon:  a crusty, irascible, cantankerous old person full of stubborn ideas.

The Free Dictionary

It irritates me when people use euphemisms to hide what they really mean.  Last week I heard a phrase that is almost always doublespeak. The announcer said something like this: “President Biden is preparing to issue new regulations requiring insurance companies to pay for drugs and devices that promote reproductive health.”

Here’s the real headline: Biden wants you to pay insurance premiums so other people can get free condoms, birth control pills, IUDs, morning-after pills, etc. There may be a good idea in there somewhere, but we don’t know because we don’t really think about it using words that describe the issue. It’s not “reproductive health.

The whole thing comes under the penumbra of “reproductive rights,” which in our day and age means the right to have sexual intercourse with anyone, for any reason, without responsibility or consequence. If conception magically occurs despite the availability of a wealth of free information, counseling, and preventative measures, no worries! You can abort a baby at any time up until birth. I could argue that the problem is one of moral judgment and self-control, but that’s just me.

My point is that there is nothing wrong with the reproductive system of these people. That’s the problem. It works perfectly. If contraception and abortion are means to promote reproductive health, then pregnancy must be a disease process affecting the reproductive system. We know it’s not. The reproductive system, in most cases, does exactly what it was designed to do.

These things are too important to our society to be obscured by political doublespeak. Do we want to prevent reproduction? If so, let’s discuss it openly. Do we think it is sometimes necessary to abort a baby? If so, let’s talk about it and make decisions that have substance. Do we think we live in a culture where sexual license has become the rule rather than the exception? Then let’s address the decadence of our culture without shouting. Today, I want to start by asking people to tell me what they mean when they say “reproductive health. Most of them have no idea.