[marianov]

"terminate a pregnancy"? Is there a name for the practice of using more convoluted words so as no to make people focus on the real meaning of the sentence? You could have used "terminate the carrying developing offspring within the body, by terminating said offspring's capacity for metabolism, growth or reaction to stimuli". OTOH, you mention "a crying mother", which IMHO should be compared to the other tragedy: "an innocent baby being torn apart, aspirated, poisoned or killed in some other way"

And there goes my karma down in 3,2,1,...

[moomin]

Believe me, I'm not trying to avoid the full meaning of the words. I'm merely pointing out that, contrary to what some people seem to wish to believe, the people making these decisions aren't avoiding them either.

The problem is: there's no good words to use, because they've been co-opted by political positions and value judgements. "Baby" indicates you're anti-abortion, "foetus" indicates you're pro-abortion. I went for pregnancy, because that implies the "potential to be a baby".

"Terminate" has the same problem. What are the alternatives? "Abort" is pretty much taken by the pro-lifers. It's such an emotive issue that in the UK, where there is no broad based political movement that wishes to outlaw it, medical professionals don't even have a word for it. They have words for specific procedures like EPRC, and as far as I can tell they change those terms every couple of years. And of course, the terminology is the same whether the pregnancy is still ongoing or not.

[SilasX]

"You ever noticed how there are no abortion doctors, only 'reproductive health physicians'?" -> no comedian's routine

[cristianpascu]

Hang in there, brother! :) You still have like 5 points of karma.