The Language of Politics

The language of intact dilation and extraction

On April 18, 2007, the Supreme Court upheld the ‘Partial birth abortion act of 2003’ passed by congress to limit the use of an abortion procedure known in the medical community as intact dilation and extraction, which is a late term procedure that involves the removal of an intact, but lifeless fetus from the uterus. The procedure itself is rarely used in the United States, and is very rarely the only option.

Politicians and conservative religious groups successfully coined the term ‘partial birth abortion’ in order to represent this medical procedure in a non-specific way in order to illicit an emotional response from the American public and to build support against it. Recent legislation around the topic is now being used, in the views of many, to begin to reverse the abortion policy in the United States established by Roe vs. Wade that upholds abortion rights for a woman based on the principle that the well being of the mother must come first.