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

Bill Mullins amcombill at HOTMAIL.COM
Fri Jun 3 21:11:54 UTC 2022


1969 Cleveland Plain Dealer 28 Sep. 28/1
Pro-life, and pro-person, Pope Paul's encyclical may yet turn out to be also the defense of human sexuality against mere sex.


1970 Chicago Daily News 29 Apr 14/3
Mrs. Cook, R.N., in a recent letter to you, states she has "been taught respect and preservation of life."  If this is her philosophy of life, she should also favor pro-life legalities.  Rather than destroying life, abortion by consent usually preserves life, i.e. the life of extra-uterine creatures.


>
> 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
>


------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list