A new lexicon introduced by the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound is designed to make embryos seem less human.
A new lexicon introduced by the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound is designed to make embryos seem less human.
A ll across the country, Americans are waking up to a new and welcome reality. The shackles of DEI, woke, and trans chauvinism, imposed from the top down, appear to be loosening, and it just might be that a new, muscular repudiation of these ideologies at the federal and state levels will succeed.
However, there is much work to be done, because we have lost ground not just on the battlefields of regulation and law, but also — insidiously — in the English language.
George Orwell, of course, wrote the definitive descriptions of the manipulation of language in his novel 1984. Real-life examples abound up and down history, wherein authoritarians create and then enforce novel and narrow lexicons to spur conformity in word and, ultimately, in thought and deed.
One example particularly irks me, as a mother of five. The Biden-Harris administration replaced the word “mothers” with “birthing people” in its 2022 fiscal year budget. It’s “newspeak” (Orwell’s well-coined term), and it’s dehumanizing. The new term topples the pedestal on which human cultures have long placed motherhood, exalting mothers as the icon of tenderness and self-sacrifice. The new term also perverts motherhood into yet another political minefield.
As a radiologist who performs ultrasounds, I’m sorry to report that the totalitarian impulse is alive and well in radiology’s professional associations. It’s even coming for our language. Specifically, the tyrants of today are trying to distort the language we use when describing embryos.
The Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound has published a list of words for us to use and avoid in fetal ultrasonography. The members of the society are perfectly frank about having political aims. In the introduction they bring up the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the necessity, they say, to “minimize bias and harm.”
We are to stop using the word “heart” and the word “living” in our reports. For 25 years I have been using the following phrase — which I learned from the attending physicians in my residency — to describe an embryo: “There is a single, live, intrauterine gestation with a fetal heart rate of x bpm.”
The society rejects the word “heart,” they state, because it “implies a fully formed organ.” We are told to use the words “cardiac activity.” Of course, “cardiac” is an adjective that means “relating to the heart,” but “heart” humanizes the embryo by using an everyday term. (No one has ever said: “My cardiac organ was beating so fast!”) The panel that published this list is worried, clearly, that anyone who reads the word “heart” on a report might infer that an embryo is actually a little human being, that each person was once a tiny embryo, entirely dependent on the sufferance of their mother, and that the heart that now beats in my chest was once the same small heart beating in my mother’s womb.
The society also finds the words “live” and “living” problematic. Here, they are more candid about their political aims. They say these words are “best avoided because these terms may be appropriated by people outside of the field of medicine to support political rhetoric and proscriptive legislation.” They seem to know that the living — especially living human beings — have a special claim on our solidarity and compassion that the nonliving do not.
Are embryos with beating hearts in fact alive? The answer is an indisputable “yes.” This “yes” is a scientific determination, not a philosophical or theological opinion. The medical community has not questioned this “yes” since the advent of modern medicine. In fact, a 2021 study that asked over 5,000 biologists around the world when human life begins found an overwhelming consensus — over 96 percent affirmed that life begins at conception.
And, about four weeks after conception, I can see an embryonic heart beating on my ultrasound machine. When I tell anxious moms and dads that their baby is alive, I’m announcing something deeply meaningful and moving. Until that heart stops beating — which could be 85 years later — that human being will continue to live.
I, for one, will not be using the proposed “newspeak” in my radiology reporting. I’ll continue to express myself with integrity, using words long embedded in human experience, anchored in tradition, and pregnant with meaning. Orwell called this “oldspeak” — a language that is not just more aligned with human reality, but one that also creates a vibrant civic life through shared and time-tested understanding. Newspeak, the manipulative language imposed by ideologues, divides us from our past and from each other.
Most importantly, the new lexicons divide us from reality and force us, by a thousand cuts, to participate in each current, politically expeditious lie. Discontented with forcing these lies upon themselves alone, tyrants insist on making us all complicit, eroding our integrity one nudge at a time. They know that, eventually, we will accede to anything — if we do not resist. Vaclav Havel, Czech dissident and statesman, best explained this moral risk: “Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did. . . . They must live within a lie. . . . For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”