The AP Changes Its Style Book After the Abortion Controversy and Manages to Terminate Its Relevancy – Opinion

This week, the pro-life debate erupted again, and there was a surprising development from the lecturing, controlling section of journalism. It was quite a departure from what we have been taught for most of the year. This Rachel Maddow example will help you spot the difference.

It would change the country fundamentally. It would change fundamentally the relationship between the women and the government. It would fundamentally change the future for… all our daughters and granddaughters, and women that come after us.” –@Maddow pic.twitter.com/kgfGDq0HXf

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 3, 2022

It was in a rather quick fashion that those who are ardently worried about being inclusive and try forcing people to use terms like ‘’birthing individual’’ were able to dispatch that glossarial requirement the moment abortion was shown to be threatened. Just like that, “women” became an acceptable term once again, because the right to take the life of an unborn child is far more important than inclusiveness and societal engineering.

These kinds of missteps are bound to arise when you see the high level of emotional reactions this subject evokes from those on the left (Here, Senator Warren – have a Snickers bar.) Just as women have regained agency, another sign of the verbal paradox some face has emerged. The Associated Press released an updated version of its acclaimed Style Guide to show that it is still a struggle.

Alert: New AP Style pic.twitter.com/bCYr8KExr2

— Kimberlee Kruesi (@kkruesi) May 4, 2022

So, the pair pulled the pin from the handgrenade and walked through the minefield. The press has now placed itself in the position to undercut their social standards in order to maintain them. Either they are wailing over the loss of women’s rights and therefore become exclusionary, or they need to alter their phrasing by using the less-catchy term like “violating the birthing person’s right to healthcare.”  

So either ‘’pregnant people’’ is fine in a general topic discussion, or “women” is acceptable when talking specifically about abortion rights because that is who is specifically being targeted by the evil GOP legislation, though you need to be pregnant first in order to get an abortion, and yet you can still be a woman without being pregnant. Then things are even more fluid when you have “birthing person” on the table because that term does not really work in a discussion about terminating the birth.

This is, frankly speaking, as tedious as it gets. It becomes yet another reason I can’t stand the AP Style Book. It was at the height of Black Lives Matter riots when I first discovered the Style Book. AP published a revision, indicating that it would be proper going forward to capitalize the first letter in an ethnic race – only not all of them. It would be proper, according to them, to use the word “Black,” for various reasons, but you must continue to go with “white,” for deeply non-linguistic reasons. 

The rationale at that time was one should capitalize “Black” due to ‘’The need to be inclusive, respectful and open-minded’’ but then the next month, announcing the “white” race should remain uncapitalized was a clear act of not being inclusive. The editors clarified their position and said ”The lowercase black is a color, not a person.” Except, lower case ”white’’ WouldRefer to someone, meaning their intention on being respectful was also lost.  

They find themselves in a ridiculous world when their focus is more on virtue signalling and activism than actual language. Their concern is more with being viewed as correct than being right. In doing so they inspire comments and columns such as this one, and as a result, they end up in the position of the reporter Kimberlee Kruesi – after raising the topic of language, they would rather not talk about it.

Well. This is the time to silence it.

— Kimberlee Kruesi (@kkruesi) May 5, 2022