Rudy Giuliani has made a strategic choice in the Republican primary contest. He will stay pro-choice on the issue of abortion, and thus avoid the flip-flopper label that has so harmed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

But Giuliani has a flip-flop in his past. When he first began running for New York City mayor in 1989, he said that he personally opposed abortion, favored overturning Roe v. Wade and opposed public financing of abortions. During that campaign he morphed into an unmodulated pro-choicer. He dropped talk of opposing Roe v. Wade and endorsed taxpayer funding of abortion. By the time he was mayor, he was declaring a "Planned Parenthood Day" in New York and all but pledging to perform abortions himself, should it ever come to that.

Now that's he's running for president he says that he "hates" abortion -- something he didn't mention when he gave opening remarks at NARAL's "Champions of Choice" lunch in April 2001. (Back then, New Yorkers had a "distinguished tradition" of promoting abortion.) He now supports a partial-birth ban, which he had opposed. His aides say he supports -- or wouldn't seek to change -- the Hyde amendment banning Medicaid financing of most abortions, even though he once opposed it.

The stakes in this semantics game are high. At issue -- and indeed, the whole point of this postmodernist exercise -- is whether activists will be able to convince other states to join Oregon in redefining the crime of assisted suicide as a legitimate "medical treatment." If that happens, funding of assisted suicide would soon follow, just as it has in Oregon, where the act of facilitating suicide is now deemed a state-funded form of "comfort care."...

So C & C commissioned research and polling. They found that people have a negative impression of the term "assisted suicide," but, if euphemistic slogans like "death with dignity" or "end of life choices" were used to describe the same action, response was relatively positive. Likewise, poll respondents were more apt to approve letting doctors "end a patient's life" than they were to approve giving doctors the right to "assist the patient to commit suicide." According to one polling firm, the apparent conflict was a "consequence of mentioning, or not mentioning, the word 'suicide.'"

As a result, assisted-suicide advocates concluded that the accurate word "suicide" had to go. They embarked on a crusade to erase and replace it with kinder, gentler language that masked the harsh reality of what was being discussed.