Abortion

Is Whoopi Goldberg becoming the Rosie O’Donnell type bully? It appeared that way on the October 3 edition of “The View.” A discussion about Hillary Clinton’s $5,000 a baby entitlement plan quickly descended into a heated exchange between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg about abortion.

When Hasselbeck noted that $5,000 a baby could lead to fewer abortions in the world, Whoopi told Hasselbeck to “back off” because Hasselbeck has never “been in a position” where she “had to make that decision.”

Whoopi, who claimed to march in a NARAL rally with Katie Couric, also added Elisabeth should have “a little bit of reverence” to the women who had abortions and then spread propaganda about women “found bleeding dead with hangers in their bodies.”

Full transcript below the jump. Watch the video over at Ian Schwartz's blog.

In the information age, misinformation is too often traded as a counterfeit currency in our marketplace of ideas.

The recent Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh non-scandelettes have proven this in spades. But disingenuous attacks on individual public figures are hardly the only kind of falsehood you'll find in the partisan press. Today's merchants of disinformation also trade frequently in false stereotypes of large groups of Americans, especially those who even slightly oppose abortion.

Those of you who are pro-life may not know this but despite whatever you may think, all of you are actually overweight, hyper-religious, uneducated, spouse-beating, rural, white males. Or at least that's what you are in the minds of the fanatically pro-choice left.

According to CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the election of a Republican president in 2008 will bring a certain end to Roe v. Wade.

Toobin has made the rounds promoting his new book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. In a recent Time.com article (a straight question-and-answer account of his interview), Toobin stated the following:

Time.com: Your book strongly suggests that personalities and personal views are more important than case law.

Hiding behind a fake company name, Planned Parenthood came into Aurora, Illinois, a suburban Chicago neighborhood, and built an abortion clinic without telling the city of Aurora that it was to be an abortion clinic. Yet, all the news about this story is centering on the pro-abortion/pro-life debate instead of Planned Parenthood's lies. This story has been going on for a few days in Aurora, Illinois. It seems Planned Parenthood told a teeny, tiny white lie to the City Planning Board of Aurora about what use a new building they were constructing near a residential neighborhood would be put to. In fact, they even misled city officials as to who they even were, and those officials are none too happy about it.

The city granted a building permit to a company called Gemini Office Development LLC to build what was being called a “medical office building.” It turns out, however, that Gemini Office Development LLC is actually a shell company for Planned Parenthood and this new building was not going to be just a regular, non-descript “medical office building” but a Planned Parenthood abortion mill, instead. Curiously, Planned Parenthood neglected to tell the city of its plans until the building was complete and they were ready to open for business.

An article in today's Los Angeles Times (Mon. 9/17/07) addressed criminal charges being filed in Kansas against the infamous late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller. According to the article, Tiller faces 19 counts of "aborting viable fetuses without first consulting an independent physician as required by state law."

As often is the case, the Times is unable to control itself in presenting a misleading and biased story. And not surprisingly, the culprit in this journalistic craftiness is Stephanie Simon, whose work we've reported on in the past here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. This time:

The Daily Mail, which seemingly has a reputation for being a "conservative" newspaper in the UK, has performed an act of self-censorship. An article in the September 12 edition of Britain’s second most-popular newspaper featured the accounts of seven British women who had abortions. It appeared in both the web and print editions of the newspaper.

Dawn Eden of the popular Dawn Patrol blog highlighted one woman’s account on Tuesday night, in which she gave a graphic description of her abortion. By Wednesday morning, the account had been removed from the web edition of the article on the Daily Mail’s website.

The Los Angeles Times has an article today (Mon. 9/10/07) about a new law in Missouri. It dictates that all of Missouri's abortion mills be properly stocked with medical equipment and have adequately wide doorways and hallways to handle emergencies. Abortionists are raising a stink because renovations to their facilities could be burdensomely costly. The law would also apply to clinics who solely issue the abortion pill.

In reporting the story, the Times completely omits some important facts about the abortion pill. Since it was approved for use in the United States in 2000, Mifepristone (Mifeprex/RU-486/"the abortion pill") is "associated with the deaths of at least 8 women, 9 life-threatening incidents, 232 hospitalizations, 116 blood transfusions, and 88 cases of infection. There are more than 950 adverse event cases associated with RU-486 out of only 575,000 prescriptions, at most" (emphasis mine) (source, US House of Representatives hearing, May/Oct. 2006).

Views on abortion are basically binary: you're essentially either pro-life or pro-choice. And Americans are almost evenly divided. According to the Gallup Poll:

[W]hen the entire issue is distilled to the labels most commonly used on each side of the debate -- pro-choice vs. pro-life -- the public is split nearly down the middle.

Under these circumstances, it would seem logically impossible for one of the positions to be inherently "more moderate" than the other. But consider this sentence from a New York Times article of today, Opponents Attack Giuliani’s New York Record:

The Chicago Sun-Times is blaming the Bush administration for what they claim is sure to be a rise in unplanned pregnancies at colleges and universities across the country. It hasn't happened yet, mind you, but they are sure it's gonna! Naturally, the paper cannot imagine we should place any blame on the stupid students who are getting themselves pregnant. I mean, it HAS to be Bush's fault, you see, with personal responsibility being so last century and all. No, the Sun-Times is sure that a cut in the amount of Federal money doled out to our institutions of higher learning for cheap birth control is going to wreak havoc with the student body. Our kids are obviously too stupid to get by without that government spending.

The Sun-Times, worrying that the cost of birth control available to students in colleges is going to rise, imagines a law reducing Federal spending is somehow forcing students to have unprotected sex. "Birth-control costs soaring at colleges -- Pregnancies could rise now that law limits drugmaker incentives", they proclaim. This calamity is all being blamed on the "Deficit Reduction Act signed by President Bush last year" according to the Sun-Times.

The TIME headline is ironic: “Study Finds Abortion Pill Safe.” Safe for whom exactly?  Certainly not for the millions of pre-born children who have died when their mothers took it.  Nor is it “safe” for their mothers.

The August 15 article by Sara Song (and the story run by AP on August 16) touts the findings released in the New England Journal of Medicine that show use of the RU-486 abortion pill “in the long term, is safe.”

That’s a message the feminist influenced, pro-choice media want to promote. In her article Song wrote “women who use mifepristone (RU 486) are no better or worse off than those who choose surgical abortion” and that “most existing research shows that surgical abortions have no effect on overall health risks.” 

On Tuesday’s edition of "Nightline," anchor Martin Bashir interviewed businessman Tom Monaghan, founder of a new Catholic university in Florida and also a community called Ave Maria that will be based around Catholic values. Bashir parroted criticism that the town has "been described as a Catholic Jonestown, a kind of Catholic Iran, where individual rights and liberties are curtailed."

Earlier in the segment, Bashir asserted that the community, which will encourage traditional values but be open to all, has "been called a Disney World for Catholics, a country club Christianity."

Republicans held a debate on Sunday, but CBS’s Hannah Storm seemed more interested in Rudy Giuliani’s personal life and then Mitt Romney’s crankiness. On the August 6 edition of "The Early Show," at 7:19 AM, Storm kicked off the segment noting there was a Republican debate the previous day but, "they did not talk about an issue hanging over front-runner Rudy Giuliani and that is his wife, Judith, who has become a controversial topic in his campaign."

When liberals aren't taunting conservatives with death wishes, they will often, under a guise of concern, talk of how hopefully this brush with fate will give the conservative a more humane, compassionate, less restrictive outlook on life (i.e., become a Democrat).

There's an undercurrent of that in New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse's "Supreme Court Memo," "Uncertainty Now in a Golden Youth's Trajectory," on Chief Justice John Roberts' seizure. Greenhouse evidently hoped that Roberts' brush with fallibility will soften the whiz-kid conservative's heart.

The Baltimore Sun is hardly a right-wing rag, in fact its editorials and its overall news judgment, as many a Marylander registered on this site can tell you, is rabidly left-wing. But even the Sun, reporting on yesterday's heinous, grisly discovery of four murdered stillborn infants in Ocean City, Md., used the term "baby" to describe the victims. The Associated Press also used the term "baby" to describe the pre-born or stillborn victims.

So what's holding Andrea Stone of USA Today back? The word "baby" appeared twice in her July 31 story, but only in quotes, from a police spokesman and the Worcester County State's Attorney. Likewise the term "infant" was only used once in Stone's story, again within quotes from a police report.

Also to the Sun's credit--although really it should be standard practice when the MSM report on abortion matters-- Sun reporter Lynn Anderson avoided the left-wing euphemism "woman's right to choose" in favor of a grammatically correct phrase that includes the word "abortion." In this excerpt, Anderson is describing the law under which suspect Christy Freeman may be prosecuted:

Helen Thomas, the Hearst columnist and long-time scourge of Republican presidents as UPI White House correspondent, was "miffed" at Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau because he joked that the rumors were that she was Harry Truman's lover: "I wished he said I was Jack Kennedy's lover."

If that makes Thomas sound like a liberated woman, that would be in line with her recent Planned Parenthood luncheon speech in Iowa, where she claimed conservatives would love to deny women even their right to vote: "It seems now, more than ever, the Supreme Court is prepared to put Americans -- especially women -- back in the 19th century if not earlier...Women, in particular, have to be more vigilant. They can never let go and think that the battle is won. There has been a chipping-away at every advance we've had. Pretty soon they'll be taking aim at the vote."

A July 26, 2007, Los Angeles Times article by Stephanie Simon (whose work we've addressed in the past here, here, here, here, here, and here) claims there's been a "striking shift" by Democrats on the issue of abortion. She also asserts, "Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail have begun to adopt some of the language and policy goals of the antiabortion movement." Simon's article is entitled, "Democrats shift approach on abortion," and if the folks at the DNC aren't laughing their pants off, they're certainly not complaining.

Newsbusters revealed the overwhelming left-wing bias of the YouTube video question clips at the CNN Democrat presidential debate on Monday night. One of the most outrageous questions of the night came from Anne Laird of Pennsylvania (pictured at right), who identified herself as an employee of Planned Parenthood. Laird asked, “My question is, we here at Planned Parenthood support comprehensive sex education, and I'd like to know if any of you as candidates have talked to your children about sex, and used medically accurate and age-appropriate information?” Laird uses the word “we” in the question -- due to the fact that her clip was one of 22 that was submitted by Planned Parenthood and its supporters on one YouTube.com account with the user name PPVotes.

Laird, an Altoona, Pennsylvania native who works for Planned Parenthood in the Pennsylvania state capitol of Harrisburg, asked her question at a recent Planned Parenthood conference in Washington, DC, as revealed by an article in the Altoona Mirror. Other attendees at the conference asked a range of questions which reflect Planned Parenthood’s comprehensive sexual agenda, from “Would you push for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment?,” “Will you repeal the global gag rule?” (referring to the Mexico City policy of the Reagan administration, which was reinstated by the Bush administration), to “Would you protect a woman’s right to control her body?” (an obvious reference to Planned Parenthood’s support for Roe v. Wade).

As if allowing this anti-American Bush-hater to have his own series wasn't enough, the brilliant folks at HBO decided to give Bill Maher another comedy special to rail against all things conservative.

For those on the left hoping for some truly vile attacks on the GOP, Saturday's "Bill Maher: The Decider" surely must have hit the spot.

In fact, of the 60 minutes Maher was given, upwards of 40 were spent eviscerating the President, his staff, Republican presidential candidates, and religious figures. In reality, this was a virtual campaign video for Democrats.

With that in mind, what follows are some of the lowlights in no particular order. However, the reader is cautioned that this is not edited for content, and contains some truly vulgar language.

As such, proceed at your own risk (partial video available here):

Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday wants abortion. In the movies, that is. In her July 15 piece Hornaday complains that two box office successes this summer, “Waitress” and “Knocked Up,” feature main characters that are pregnant. Both are unmarried and less than thrilled with their pregnancies. Both have their babies.

“It’s a setup that has some viewers, especially women who came of age in a post-Roe v. Wade America, wondering just what world these movies are living in.”

Well, Ann, they’re living in the modern day world where the number of out-of-wedlock births among 20- and 30-something women is dramatically up, according to a poll conducted by Pew Research. Just look at Brangelina, if you want to see what that looks like in real life.

On Saturday's NBC Nightly News, correspondent Pete Williams presented a one-sided look at the Supreme Court's "shift to the right," conveying complaints by liberals over recent court rulings, but without showing any conservatives who supported some of the court's recent right-leaning decisions. Williams began his piece by quoting liberal Justice Stephen Breyer's complaint that "It's not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,"  before playing a soundbite of the ACLU's Steven Shapiro: "Civil liberties and civil rights took a beating virtually across the board from race to religion to abortion to speech to the basic right to come into court and sue when you've been a victim of discrimination." Williams also found that Chief Justice John Roberts "has turned out to be more conservative than even some of the court's liberals thought he would be." (Transcript follows)

The following is submitted by Jason Aslinger, a NewsBusters reader and a private practice attorney from Greenville, Ohio. Cohen pictured at right (file photo).

In his June 28 "Court Watch" article, CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen laments the conservative bent of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. But rather than give readers sound legal critiques, Cohen sounds out a decidely political lament.

With a title like “Rightward Ho!” you might think that Cohen would attack the Court’s conservative justices, and he does, dismissing Justice Samuel Alito as a "rigid starboard-facing ideologue" while he derides Chief Justice John Roberts as "silly and condescending."

Cohen lists several cases from the 2007 term in which, in Cohen’s view, Justice Alito delivered the deciding vote. Cohen writes:

Maybe this afternoon's oppressive heat and humidity on the Hardball Plaza in DC were getting to Chris Matthews. I'm not sure how else to explain his complaint, to the effect that it is wrong of the Roman Catholic Church to apply its rules to politicians as it does to other adherents.

His remark came in the course of a debate on religion on this afternoon's edition of "Hardball" between Christopher Hitchens, author of the atheist polemic "God Is Not Great", and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

HARDBALL HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS: Today you have the Roman Catholic church through its bishops challenging the rights of Catholic office-holders to take positions for abortion rights. They basically say you have to be for imprisonment of people involved with abortion or else you're not a Catholic and you'll be excommunicated. It seems to be an era, not just because of Islam, to keep religion out of politics . . . Why are they foisting themselves, why are the religious leaders jumping into the political marketplace and saying to politically-elected people, who are duly elected, "you cannot take that position and be in our church, or we will excommunicate you"? That seems to be what's going on.

View video here.

On the June 21 edition of "The View" the ladies discussed President Bush’s veto of the embryonic stem cell veto funding bill. On what may be a positive trend, the co-hosts split evenly on the issue with Gayle King and Joy Behar for the funding and Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Sherri Shepherd opposed.

Joy Behar exclaimed it violates the "separation of church and state" because some religious organizations morally oppose the practice. Behar, who considers the title "fringe liberal" "name calling," opined that Bush "listens to the extreme religious right in this country."

When Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who articulated her points very well, noted the she does not want her tax money to go to something she considers unethical, Behar dragged in the Iraq War and said that argument "pisses me off." When Behar said abortion is legal, Hasselbeck responded "it is not a question of banning. It’s a question of funding at this point."

In the closing moments of a segment on the June 19, 2007, episode of Hannity & Colmes, co-host Alan Colmes asserted, "Most Americans are pro-choice."

The truth? Well, it depends what poll you look at. In the specific issue of "pro-choice" vs. "pro-life," Colmes might want to take a look at a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll from last month, May 4-6, 2007. 1,028 adults were questioned. The margin of error is ±3%. (source, scroll down)

"With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?"

Pro-choice    45%           Pro-life    50%              (Other answers comprised 5%) 

Brian Fitzpatrick of our Culture and Media Institute passes along the latest nugget of wisdom from CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin (also of The New Yorker magazine), on the Supreme Court and partial birth abortion:

Most notoriously, the Court, for the first time in its history, upheld a categorical ban on an abortion procedure. The case dealt with so-called partial-birth abortion—a procedure performed rarely, often when there are extraordinary risks to the mother, the fetus, or both.

Writes Brian, as he nominates this for stupidest quote of the year: "Oh, sure. As if an abortionist takes risks to the fetus into account!" What genius from the Harvard man (B.A. 1982, J.D., 1986)!

Clay Waters of Times Watch alerted me to a new item in the Shameless Hillary Department: Ben Smith at Politico.com reports Mother Teresa's missionaries have protested Hillary's use of a photograph of her waving next to Mother Teresa in a Hillary campaign video, in which the announcer said: "Hillary in effect, was the face of America, in Africa, in India..." The picture was used as the words "in India" were narrated. Will the rest of the media follow up on this story?

The head of a politically conservative Catholic group, Fidelis, said he brought the video to the attention of Sister Nirmala, Teresa's successor at the Superior General of the India-based Missionaries of Charity. Fidelis president Joseph Cella called it "wholly inappropriate, disrespectful and disturbing that Hillary Clinton shamelessly exploited Mother’s image as a political tool."

The mainstream media often obsess about the profit margins of "Big Oil" companies. We at NewsBusters and our friends at the MRC's Business & Media Institute have frequently documented how the media view the petroleum industry in a particularly fiendish manner at the very worst and a highly skeptical light at best.

So surely the MSM will have just as much outrage when there's a corporation that receives from the taxpayer what literally amounts to blood money, and, to top it off, has a very healthy profit margin, right?

Unlikely if the name of that corporation is Planned Parenthood:

(CNSNews.com)* - Despite a drop in donations and the first fall in income from clinics in its history, the nation's biggest abortion provider made a high profit last year, thanks to the American taxpayer. Pro-lifers want this to stop.

During its 2005-2006 fiscal year, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America performed a record 264,943 abortions, attained a high profit of $55.8 million and received record taxpayer funding of $305.3 million.

According to its annual report, income is divided roughly into three major categories: clinic income (fees charged to customers at clinics); donations (gifts from corporations, foundations and individuals); and taxpayer money (grants and contracts from federal, state and local government).

Mireya Navarro of The New York Times took 32 paragraphs in her June 10 Fashion & Style section article to tell you what I'm about to in one sentence. (h/t Clay Waters of NB sister publication TimesWatch)

Liberal Hollywood doesn't feature women having abortions in TV and movies very often because it's bad to alienate a sizable chunk, if not an outright majority, of your audience who are pro-life.

Of course, you can't fault Hollywood for being pro-choice where it counts to them most. Choosing plotlines and conventional stories that boost the bottom line. That is, unless you're an artiste who is forever battling the crass capitalistic forces of banality, like say, Christopher Keyser. You know, the cinematic Michelangelo that gave us the late-1990s Fox drama 'Party of Five.' Navarro thought it important that we hear from him and other liberals in the industry who lament this one area where Hollywood remains mostly conservative, if only because they feel the heat rather than see the light.

The May 14 issue of Newsweek proclaimed that some descendants of famous Republicans--Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater--are thinking about changing parties and voting Blue. In an article titled, “Generational Tensions: The sons and daughters of some iconic Republicans (Ike! T.R.!) are contemplating crossing the aisle,” reporter Michael Hirsch set up the improbable idea that the logical move by unhappy "fiscally conservative" Republicans is to the Democratic Party. According to Ike's granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, “moderate ‘Eisenhower Republicans’ “ are not content, but Newsweek did not fully explore the illogic of this proposed alternative (emphasis mine throughout):

Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency—and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers—is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP.

Debatably, the dissatisfaction of moderate Republicans with the Iraq war and with what the article categorized as religiously influenced issues surrounding topics like Terri Schiavo, abortion and homosexuality can be answered by the Democratic Party, but not the problems of bloated bureaucracies and out of control spending. The article did not state the obvious; a Big Government GOP is still smaller than the modern Democratic Party.

Matthew Balan showed me that The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that a woman "who considers herself an advocate for issues affecting women and families" is all about declaring that Philadelphia is officially a city where women can safely "terminate" pregnancies and insure they don't create a family. Couldn't they just call her a liberal, or an abortion advocate? Patrick Kerkstra reported the vote was nine to eight:

Already this year, more than 50 resolutions have sailed through City Council, including those that honored Miss Philadelphia, chastised Don Imus, and designated "Safe Kids Week." With rare exception, these purely symbolic gestures are approved by unanimous voice vote.