California taxpayers subsidize abortion tourism.
— Brietbart headline
GOP crazies are accusing Democrats of a weird form of political point-scoring.They're calling it "abortion tourism."
Give me a break.
"Abortion tourism" isn't a thing.
It's no more a thing than "colostomy farming."
Abortion is a medical procedure. Tourism is a facet of the leisure industry.
Plastering the two terms together does not make them a thing.
It's only another Orwellian coinage.
The GOP loves Orwellian Newspeak, the language of 1984 that the ruling party in the novel created "to diminish the range of thought."
Newspeak comprised a "verbal shorthand," Orwell said, that "consisted of words deliberately constructed for political purposes."
These words packed "whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables."
Their purpose was "not so much to express meanings as to destroy them."
When you destroy meaning, Orwell showed us, you destroy thought.
Right-wingers like Daines would no doubt deny they're using Orwellian Newspeak.
They'd insist that "abortion tourism" is merely a linguistic cousin of "medical tourism," the term we commonly use to describe international travel for medical care.
They'd insist that "abortion tourism" carries no particular judgment.
But that defense is disingenuous.
They know the term is a wry distortion which implies that the woman who seeks an abortion is frivolous—a tourist; and the abortion clinic that serves her is a leisure-industry profiteer—a Disneyland with stirrups.
When nothing could be farther from the truth.
