pro-choice

pro-life, pro-choice

These terms are so widely used in the context of the moral debate about abortion, denoting respectively those who are opposed to it and those who believe mothers should be left to make a choice, that they can seem to have acquired a standard or ‘official’ status. But they are of course loaded judgemental terms and should be avoided in objective writing on the issue, unless the attitudes they represent are also relevant. The terms are also applied in other areas of medical practice involving matters of life and death, such as sustaining life-support systems for those who are severely handicapped or unlikely to make a recovery, and the same reservations about usage apply.