Pro-choice and pro-life

The earliest use of the term pro-life cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is in the 1960 book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing by educator A. S. Neill, though Neill uses it in a more general sense not specific to abortion: No pro-life parent or teacher would ever strike a child.

[1][2]The earliest citation for an abortion-specific sense of the term is a 1971 reference in the Los Angeles Times to "pro-life, anti-abortion educational programs".

[1] New York Times language columnist William Safire credits Nellie Gray with popularizing pro-life as a shortened form of the "right to life" slogan.

[1][4] The first use of the term cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is in a 1969 issue of the California daily newspaper the Oxnard Press-Courier, which referred to "Pro-choice and anti-abortion activists... headed to the Women's Clinic.

"[5] Authors Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel identify a 1972 memo by Jimmye Kimmey, executive director of the Association for the Study of Abortion, as the genesis of the subsequent widespread adoption of the pro-choice label.

[3] In the years before pro-choice became widely adopted, the qualifier pro-abortion was commonly used by those advocating for legal abortion.

[9][1][3] The decision to brand the movements in positive rather than negative terms has been compared to the earlier use of the phrase "right-to-work" instead of "anti-union".