Forty years ago, Dr. Bernard Nathanson’s documentary film, The Silent Scream, promised/threatened to redefine the discussion of abortion. While Leenart Nilsson’s 1965 Life magazine photo essay had pulled back the uterine veil, Silent Scream, using ultrasound images, presented viewers with “real-time” views of prenatal life.

And death. With almost chilling clinical detachment, Nathanson narrates the killing of a 12-week-old fetus in a vacuum aspiration, the most common and frequently employed abortion method. Viewers see the child move away as a suction instrument aggressively dismembers first his legs then the rest of his body, his mouth contorted in what Nathanson describes as a “silent scream.”

The advent of ultrasound represented an enormous threat to the abortion establishment, which depended on keeping the procedure’s gruesome realities out of public view. Not surprisingly, Silent Scream elicited the same kind of response we more recently saw to David Daleiden’s 2015 exposé of Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in fetal body parts—basically, “Don’t believe what you’re seeing.” Ultrasounds used in the film, abortionists said, were “grainy,” and Nathanson’s claims merely “interpretations” superimposed on “chalky” images.

In the ensuing decades, however, ultrasound became a standard component of prenatal OB-GYN care, and the clarity of images improved. Few today would tell an ultrasonographer that the human being moving about on the screen is not “my baby.” Indeed, many parents begin their child’s photo album with their first ultrasound pictures.

Pro-life states quickly realized that ultrasound, by giving mothers a literal look at their child before deciding to kill him, could be used to counter pro-abortion propaganda about “clumps of cells” and “tissue.” Many states passed legislation requiring an ultrasound be shown to the mother before an abortion could be performed. Abortionists protested such laws, claiming they were medically unnecessary “TRAPs” (Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers). When abortion advocates managed to take control of state legislatures (e.g., in Virginia), such ultrasound requirements were typically targets for rapid repeal.

A prenatal ultrasound before an abortion is not, obviously, an “unnecessary” medical procedure. In fact, it is routine, providing vital information, e.g., gestational age (which regulates abortion procedures in many states) and fetal orientation (which, paradoxically, gives the abortionist useful information). The only “TRAP” that abortionists consider “medically unnecessary” is showing the picture to the mother, even though modern medical ethics, especially since the 1970s (and in response to earlier medical paternalism), has been emphatic about “informed consent.”

Along with pulling down the shades on visual access to the womb, some in the ultrasound community now want to control the language that is used to describe what’s seen there. That’s not surprising because, as the late journalist Paul Greenberg pithily observed, “verbicide precedes homicide.” Abortionists have always sought to control language in order to frame the narrative. When states began enacting heartbeat laws, based on the elementary insight that a beating heart was indicative of life, abortionists quickly sought to shut that description down.

Just before Christmas, Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie, a radiologist who performs ultrasounds, broke a story in National Review about new guidelines published by the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound on how ultrasound medical reports should be written. Long story short, any language suggestive that the unborn child is a living child should be suppressed. The linguistic cleansing is focused on the first trimester of pregnancy, when most women first encounter ultrasounds and most abortions take place.

Often when medical practitioners opine about something—especially when they are part of a “committee” or “study group” using “scientific” terminology—it’s quickly claimed that a new “expert consensus” has been reached. That cachet obviously facilitates change. That said, the authors of this rewrite of the ultrasound lexicon admit other factors influenced their work. Now that patients can access their own medical records online (e.g., via myChart), some (presumably pro-abortion) women might, they worry, take offense at any indication of fetal humanity (for instance in words like “living”). The authors also don’t want ultrasound language “to negatively affect the physician-patient relationship and criminalize patients and practitioners.” In other words, they don’t want knowledge gleaned from an ultrasound being used to question the legality of a particular abortion in a given state. So, let’s sanitize the vocabulary!

The most important change circles back to the heartbeat-law debates. Since common sense suggests that a “beating heart” is a sign of life, such terminology will not do. Rather, the Society advises, in lieu of “heart” or “heartbeat,” the ultrasonographer should refer to “cardiac activity.” (“Cardiac” activity without a cor, while an obvious logical fallacy, nevertheless allows clinical terminology to mask what everybody knows is going on.)

Nor can the source of the “cardiac activity” be called a “heart.” because it is not “a fully formed organ.” (Does this mean that prior to puberty there are no testes or ovaries?) “Live” and “living,” as attributes of a being with a heartbeat, are to be avoided, because they “may be appropriated by people outside the field of medicine to support political rhetoric and proscriptive legislation.” (Does that mean, then, that “live” and “living” have particularly esoteric medical meanings that the rubes outside of the radiology department are just not privy to?) Furthermore, these terms—as well as “viable”—may give unrealistic hope to a woman who loses a pregnancy. “Viability,” in the lexicon’s view, should be limited only to the ability of a fetus to survive independently outside of the womb (obviously not possible in the first trimester).

Most of the rest of the document redefines timelines (when embryos become fetuses) and pregnancy site, e.g., ectopic pregnancies are now pregnancies implanted in an “abnormal location,” whether outside or inside the uterus. Further attention to the motivation of the timeline redefinitions seems indicated, as they are reminiscent of current efforts to move the beginning of pregnancy from the joining of sperm and egg to the fertilized ovum’s implantation in the uterus (thus roughly providing a three-week window to call certain abortifacients “contraceptives”).

Ultrasound has always been the wild card for abortionists, opening the blinds and (at least until now) providing an honest look at what happens in the womb. The effort to shield what we see, and tame how we talk about it, is not some “scientific” effort to better “define” terms. It is frankly an ideological effort to substitute esoteric terminology to foreclose drawing conclusions which, to normal people, are obvious.