[Ads-l] re-antedating of "pro-life"

[Colin Morris]

A couple years back Fred Shapiro shared a 1969 quote for "pro-life" (OED's
earliest quote being from 1971):
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2020-January/156379.html

Unfortunately, it seems this was a case of bad newspapers.com metadata. The
quoted article was from 1989, which was mis-OCR'd as 1969.

However I was able to find a genuine 1970 antedating from the May 6 issue
of The Ottawa Journal, also via newspapers.com: "Philip Cooper said he
preferred to describe the group he belongs to as pro-life rather than
anti-abortion. The organization believes human life exists from the moment
of conception and that any attempt to destroy that life is a crime."

In case anyone is interested, I wrote up a little blog post about the
origins of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" (and the question of which came
first), here: https://colinmorris.github.io/blog/prolife-antedating

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