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This article originally appeared in the June 24, 1991 issue of Christianity Today.

We will never succeed in changing our nation's abortion policies and practice until we change the language of the debate. Rhetoric is the stuff that our private and public lives are made of. The words we use, the way we talk, the stories we tell will ultimately determine what we believe and what we do.

Proponents of abortion have succeeded in selling their version of the moral context for the debate. In voicing their positions, they have repeatedly used moral terms such as compassion, freedom, and choice, so that these words have become part of a shared public vocabulary, to the point where their rhetoric appeared generously-"fundamental right to choose" and "freedom to choose"-in the wording of Justice Harry Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade back in 1973.

It is time for prolife advocates to understand the power of words and to go on the offensive. We have got to make our appeal for life, not just to the courts and legislatures, but to the hearts and minds of the American people. We have got to reach that 60 percent in the middle, those who are either uninformed, misinformed, unmoved, or undecided.

We are taking part in a great historic battle—a cultural battle—a social war to define what America is and what human life is as we enter the next millennium. And this battle is being fought not just with legislation and legal argumentation, but with words flowing to and from the public at large.

Understanding the power of words is nothing new. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Democritus taught that "word is a shadow of deed." Plato said the same thing, only negatively, "False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." The biblical letter of James tells us that those who can master their tongues can master anything. And Shakespeare warned, "In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt / But, being season'd with a gracious voice, / Obscures the show of evil?"

In the midst of the struggle over slavery, Lincoln said something that mirrors our predicament about the use of language in the abortion debate today:

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty. And the American people just now are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same words we do not mean the same thing … Each of the things is by the respective parties called by two different and incompatible means, liberty and tyranny.

Nazi leaders certainly understood the pernicious power of words when they called their facility for carrying victims to the killing centers "The Charitable Transport Company for the Sick," or when they defined the genocide of Jews as "the final solution."

And Martin Luther King, Jr., understood the positive power of words and symbols when he delivered his speech for civil rights before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. As you read the following excerpt, listen for the allusions to those words and images held dear by all Americans:

This situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed-we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47