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More Than a Fetus
December 17, 2004
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. This week in Redwood City, California, the case was closed on a national obsession. The jury of Scott Peterson's peers recommended a sentence of death, having found him guilty of the first degree murder of his wife and the second degree murder of the fetus she carried -- or as the media put it...
[COLLAGE OF VOICES]
NEWS WOMAN:
...Peterson faces the death penalty or life in prison for the murders of his wife Laci and unborn son, Conner.
NEWS WOMAN:
...an emotional effort to convince jurors that Peterson deserves the death penalty for the murders of his wife Laci, and their unborn son, Conner.
NEWS MAN:
...why he did what he did -- killed not only his wife, but his unborn child.
BOB GARFIELD:
Earlier this year, Congress passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, otherwise known as Laci and Conner's Law, and it seems news outlets are changing their terminology to match. Stories about the Peterson verdict in the Washington Post and the New York Times referred to both the fetus and the "unborn child." The Chicago Tribune stuck with "fetus" - but not for long. In the first revision of the Tribune stylebook since 1989, "fetus" will no longer refer to what a woman carries in her third trimester. That is to be called an "unborn child."
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The anti-abortion group Concerned Women for America took note of what it called an "ironic double standard." The group observed that when Scott Peterson kills, he murders an unborn child. But if a woman ends her pregnancy, she aborts a fetus.
Conner was technically a fetus. We asked Chicago Tribune Public Editor Don Wycliff and deputy managing editor Randy Weissman why his paper will no longer apply that word in the third trimester. Randy says he began with research.
RANDY WEISSMAN:
I actually made some calls. We checked with medical people, and the feeling was that, yes, pretty much any fetus in the third trimester was going to be a viable fetus. Now, is that a recent change? Not really. But I think the consensus has grown -- I mean fetuses of five months, right now, are being saved, and you know, are living.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
According to Merriam-Webster, fetus would have served just as well. Fetus is defined as: "an unborn or unhatched vertebrate, especially after attaining the basic structural plan of its kind, specifically a developing human from usually three months after conception to birth." I mean you are safe as houses with that.
DON WYCLIFF:
You're safe, but you're not reflecting the state of the language in society today. I might add that Roe v. Wade was not a decision that said the fetus or unborn child has no rights as a being. It said that-- the rights of the child as a dependent being cannot outweigh the right to liberty of the mother.
Normally, by the third trimester, one can assume that the mother intends to have this child. In most cases. And therefore, we are recognizing that, in her view, most often, the child is an unborn child and not just a fetus any longer.
RANDY WEISSMAN:
One other thing that we clearly took into account was also the legal issues. The courts have started to recognize the human status in many instances. The Scott Peterson case in and of itself was not necessarily the changing point, but what it did point out was that a court could charge a person with murder of an unborn being - and-- that kind of progression within the legal system has forced changes in a lot of different things, but certainly in our style and how we approach that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Surely you know that you're entering a very dicey area by starting to refer to some fetuses as children. You haven't avoided a debate. You've walked squarely into it.
DON WYCLIFF:
We're going to be in a debate no matter what we choose, and what we're trying to do is reflect the state of the language, and medicine, and law in the society.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What clued you in that it was time to adjust the language?
RANDY WEISSMAN:
This process of revising the stylebook began over 18 months ago. We took the old stylebook and went through it entry by entry by entry to say -- Does this need change? The term "fetus" was one of hundreds that were changed. So the decision was made before Scott Peterson even killed his wife, or the discussion was in place, at any rate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You said that you went through the stylebook entry by entry. Can you talk a little about the other linguistic quagmires that you fell into in the process of updating it? For instance, what's a terrorist?
[LAUGHTER]
DON WYCLIFF:
Funny you should mention that. [LAUGHS] Our approach is to describe the actions of the individuals involved in so-called terrorist incidents. So if they hijack a plane, we call them a hijacker. If they murder somebody, we call them a killer. And we leave to the individual reader to decide whether they think it's a terrorist or not.
I'll be frank. I don't think I've gotten more mail about anything than terrorist over the last few years. That's a persistent source of upset to a lot of people.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, you get quite a bit of reaction to the replacing of fetus with unborn child. It's the words that you use that change the way a debate is framed.
RANDY WEISSMAN:
And the words are key, and that's why we at the Tribune reflect language as if it's a living thing, and as the applications and definitions change and evolve, it's our responsibility to try to make those words more accurate and more applicable.
Just because they're controversial does not make them less accurate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Randy Weissman is deputy managing editor for operations at the Chicago Tribune, and Don Wycliff is the paper's public editor. Thank you both very much.
DON WYCLIFF:
Certainly.
RANDY WEISSMAN:
Certainly. Glad we could help.
copyright 2004 WNYC Radio
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