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

[Shapiro, Fred]

Thanks for the correction, Colin.  Usually I am very attentive to the need to confirm dates from internal evidence on the newspaper page image, but I slipped up on this one.

Fred Shapiro


________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Colin Morris <colin at CS.TORONTO.EDU>
Sent: Friday, June 3, 2022 4:33 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: re-antedating of "pro-life"

A couple years back Fred Shapiro shared a 1969 quote for "pro-life" (OED's
earliest quote being from 1971):
https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fpipermail%2Fads-l%2F2020-January%2F156379.html&data=05%7C01%7Cfred.shapiro%40YALE.EDU%7C14522d8805194249169c08da45a065c9%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C637898852843908427%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=0HllMpwD4giGo3WMgG5GtT0B2k%2FST0qi7UZt71wb7K4%3D&reserved=0

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://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcolinmorris.github.io%2Fblog%2Fprolife-antedating&data=05%7C01%7Cfred.shapiro%40YALE.EDU%7C14522d8805194249169c08da45a065c9%7Cdd8cbebb21394df8b4114e3e87abeb5c%7C0%7C0%7C637898852843908427%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=8HYtQh7CiM%2FIbvMgrMlzHIVI4iDS60DeFvbZFvqy5os%3D&reserved=0

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