Abortion - censoring dehumanization discussion
Ongoing are my struggles with Instagram ever since posting a pro-life image of a vase with a flower on it. I was reported for inappropriate content. Since then, all my accounts are locked down for reach. I can only presume that initially my post was flagged by a user. However, multiple reports sent to Instagram since then would appear to indicate that Instagram has no intention of lifting the lockdown. It's possible that using art in celebration of pregnancy from a pro-life position is not permitted (this is an inferred opinion. Only Instagram can know what is really going on). But there is a wider issue in locking down pro-life accounts, and that is the locking down of the dehumanisation conversation. Dehumanization often occurs in tandem with mass murder of a segment of the populace. Obviously, with abortion, we are looking at numbers of 73,000,000 world wide each year. If we look closer at the abortion debate, we’ll notice that the “personhood debate” is being used to dehumanize. Despite the biological fact that we are fully human from conception, personhood is used to indicate that there is a further categorization of human that the unborn don’t quite fill (according to those promoting the view). With the holocaust, Jews were referred to as subhuman and “rats”, and in the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsis were referred to as cockroaches (see here). In these cases, and others, the dehumanization was used prior to mass violence. Dehumanization, then, enables the populace to kill, as the targeted no longer possess the categorization of human. Instead, they are viewed similarly to vermin. Of course, it’s not only the personhood (dehumanization) “debate”, if you read forums you may also hear words like “parasite” being mentioned. David Livingstone Smith does not argee with the dehumanization label for abortion. Yet, in his attempt to rebuke this claim, he says that a dehumanized human must be spoken of in subhuman language, and must also be thought of as “dangerous” and unclean. It seems strange that David has not acknowledged that the “personhood debate” is language used to categorise the unborn as sub human. This is before we get to the “parasite” phraseology also often used in “unofficial” channels, which is perhaps representative of a wider held private perspective (although we must hope, not too wide). Secondly, the unborn are viewed as dangerous. They are viewed as a danger to ideology, namely that of mainstream feminism, which seems to posit that abortion-choice is needed in order to empower women. Furthermore, word meanings are not representative of fixed sets…the sets can be expanded to include further cases. In this case, the word “dehumanization” is clearly applicable to the unborn, whether or not the word has been used in this way before or not. To be clear on this, if abortion awareness came before the holocaust due to millions of dead children, then it seems probable this word, or one similar, would have come into existence (if the same justifications were being used). Unfortunately, the violence has already been perpetrated with abortion. But there is still the possibility of halting further violence. The language that is used to dehumanize needs to be halted. In order to do this, the mainstream media and social media need to permit the dehumanization discussion, otherwise they risk being proponents of the dehumanization process themselves.