NPR's Diane Rehm Show Questioning Pro-Life Tactics Can't Find One Pro-Life Caller In An Hour

August 28th, 2015 6:57 AM

After eight videos exposing Planned Parenthood from the pro-lifers at the Center for Medical Progress, NPR’s Diane Rehm Show devoted an hour Thursday morning to.....”New Tactics In the Anti-Abortion Movement.” Not the tactics of Planned Parenthood, those aren’t going to be the subject.

The guest panel was stacked with two “objective” journalists both questioning these tactics – Charles Ornstein of the ProPublica website and Jackie Calmes of The New York Times – along with Terry O’Neill of NOW and Carol Tobias of the National Right to Life Committee. Then the show is further tilted by....the callers.

Diane Rehm’s producers couldn’t find one pro-life caller in the entire hour, which suggests one of two things: either everyone listening to this show on National Progressive Radio adores the right to abortion on demand, or the conservatives somehow stay on hold for 45 minutes. (I’ve had it happen to me, although I didn’t try on Thursday as I listened during a late commute.)

This often reinforces the liberal bias on NPR – which is just the way the listeners like it. Rehm also reads e-mails, and she began with a neutral one: “I'd like to turn to you for this first email from Peggy. She says, I'd like to know what hospitals do with fetuses. Do any of your guests know?”

Then came “Marty in Akron, Ohio,” who can’t believe someone would try to stop the abortion of a mentally disabled child with Down syndrome (which, in the vast majority of cases, is aborted if diagnosed):

“Here's another email from Marty in Akron, Ohio. She says, I'm livid at the nonstop assault on women's right to control their own reproduction. This new attempt that would force a woman to carry a Down syndrome child to term is outrageous. What is the reasoning behind that statement, Carol?”

NRLC’s Carol Tobias calmly explained the bill is educational: “I think mostly it's an attempt by pro-lifers in Ohio to educate, that people with disabilities do not need to be killed just because they have the disability....I think that's kind of trying to make a point, that we shouldn't be treating people with disabilities differently. I mean, that quite frankly is discrimination."

Rehm then read more of Livid Marty in Akron: “She says, she goes on to say, who are they to say that someone needs -- that someone needs have a high-needs child to take care of for the rest of their life? Are there people who want to take on this burden? And if so, that's fine.” Tobias said: “There are. There are people who will adopt special-needs children.” But most women wouldn’t want to carry a child for adoption.

NOW’s Terry O’Neill sniped “all decisions that are -- those are reproductive health care decisions that are for the woman to make with her family and the people she trusts the most. Not for the bishops or politicians.”

Jackie Calmes of The New York Times just said the whole bill is a ridiculous “no-brainer”:

CALMES: It's hard for me to see that it would be constitutional, given past precedents, to mandate that a woman tell a doctor or be forced to tell what her reason is for getting an abortion and then limiting abortion rights on that basis under the current -- you know, this is, like I say, pros or cons of the proposal aside, just as a matter of enforcement and constitutionality, I just think it's a no-brainer that it's not.

The line of livid abortion advocates just kept coming:

Shana in South Bend attacked pro-lifers outside clinics:

I just wanted to make a comment. I'm part of a pro-choice clinic defense volunteer, and we see a lot of the anti-choice tactics to dissuade women from going into the clinic and dissuade us from acting as a buffer between them. I just wanted to describe some of their tactics with you. They take down license plate numbers of patients and make comments if they're been here before. They have children that yell at the patient, don't kill me mommy, I want to live, mommy.

They, if they learn our names, which we try not to let them know that, they take every opportunity to call our names and comment on everything we're doing. And they just generally do very intimidating things to make women not come back to the clinic after their consultation. So it's very troubling.

Ed in Phoenix suggested CMP might be committing felonies:

Yeah, hi. I want to make a comment and ask the panel here, number one, in most of the states in the United States, it's illegal to surreptitiously record without another person's knowledge. In many cases, it falls under felony statutes and the same type of statutes dealing with wiretapping, and we don't hear much about this on the media at all. And I wanted to see what's being done to the people who are doing these recordings, if anything, and why the media isn't bringing more attention to this.

Gina in Tampa was disgusted abortion rights are still a matter of debate:

Thank you for taking my call. I'm a 28-year-old grad student in Tampa, Florida, and I go to Planned Parenthood every year for an annual exam. I have never gone in for an abortion. I've seen women go in for abortions, but that's none of my business. That's between her and her doctor. And as a millennial in this country who is part of the group that's going to be controlling this country in the next coming years, I'm appalled, excuse me, that we're still having these discussions and that they're political discussions because in other countries, granted they're socialist, and that's going to bring up another issue, which is ridiculous, their abortion standards or women's health standards are -- they run smoothly.

It's -- there are no problems, not like we have in the United States. And we can't even get it together. These are women's rights being confused with medical conditions. Pregnancy is a medical condition, and it should be between a woman and her doctor.

Actually, there is no abortion debate....in the one-sided caller population of NPR. They closed the show with David in Moscow, Idaho:

Yes, I'm actually grateful that you inserted me at this point. Thank you very much, Diane. I had a question because I was one of those people that they were trying to influence with those videos, and it was working. I was morally confused. I was trying to deal with it. And then in the Washington Post, Ben Carson gave an interview, Ben Carson who is pro-life gave an interview, which destroyed the arguments that were being made by these videos concerning the necessity of the fetal tissue research.

That took the wool away from my eyes and made me realize how disingenuous the argument was from the pro-birth. I refuse to call them pro-life because they don't care about a baby after it's born, just before. And I would like the panel to address the disingenuousness of these videos and of the tactics that were referenced earlier in your show.

The show began with Charles Ornstein explaining how pro-lifers have investigated the dumpsters outside abortion clinics and filed complaints of improper disposal of fetal remains and violating the privacy of clients (un-shredded personal records). Those were the “tactics” of the segment title.

By the way, this is the same Diane Rehm who advocates against the pro-life argument on the "right to die" after she let her husband starve himself to death as he wished. She was upbraided by the network's ombudsman for using her NPR celebrity in fundraising for the pro-euthanasia crowd, so she pledged to suspend that....tactic of the anti-life movement.