Abortion

Today's "On Faith" page in the Washington Post featured a puzzling contrast that shows the left-wing media's schizophrenia when it comes to traditional religious faith. The paper's religion section editors ran these two items side-by-side: a Religion News Service (RNS) article that was thoroughly positive about Muslim women who want to design and/or model fashionable yet modest clothing, and Post religion writer Lisa Miller's attack on Catholic bishops for their stances on Christian sexual ethics in general and opposition to the ObamaCare contraception mandate in particular.

In "A Muslim fashion statement: Agency connects modesty-minded models with designers," Omar Sacirbey of RNS opened his 23-paragraph feature with the story of Savannah Uqdah, a devout Muslim woman who at one time aspired to be a fashion model but "didn't want to violate Islam's tenets on modesty." As such, Uqdah "shelved her modeling dreams and instead expressed herself through the fashions she wore." But now that modeling agencies eye a lucrative market in fashionable yet modest attire, Sacirbey notes, women like Uqdah are excited at the potential to live out their dreams.

In an interview with Pattie Mallette, mother of pop star Justin Bieber, on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie worried about Mallette's producing role in an upcoming film: "...you wanted to talk about your involvement in a movie called Crescendo....[which] tells the story of Beethoven's mother, who, while she was pregnant, attempted to have an abortion and even attempted suicide....it's a movie with a decidedly pro-life/anti-abortion purpose." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Guthrie invited Mallette to distance herself from that purpose: "But you feel like people, as I understand it, are getting the wrong message about what you are trying to say by your participation?" Mallette replied: "Yeah, I don't feel that it is a pro-life message. I mean, people are going to get from it what they want to. It's just – it's a true story, it's a historical piece." Guthrie pressed further: "Do you feel misled at all by the producers of the film? I mean, if the film has this message and its goal is to – is an anti-abortion message, I mean, are you okay with that? I guess I'm confused about what your position is."

Forget your biological clock, ladies. Here’s another internal timer set to ring: the abortion alarm. Just for you, Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan confirms that 25-years-old is the perfect age for an abortion.

“There's a point where [a woman is] financially and emotionally mature enough to support a child and her body is still capable of making babies — but what about the alternative?” Ryan asked in breezy piece for Jezebel, the site of “gossip, culture, fashion, and sex for the contemporary woman.” 

Leave it to liberal host Martin Bashir to bring on the president of Planned Parenthood to trash individuals with religious objections to the ObamaCare contraception mandate.  Speaking with Cecile Richards on February 6, Bashir conducted a Planned Parenthood advocacy session rather than an actual interview.And, naturally, Bashir failed to bring on an opposing viewpoint either in the same segment or a subsequent one.

Indeed, during the chat with Richards -- who was a fixture at the Lean Forward network during last year's "war on women" meme -- Bashir acted as cheerleader for the nation's largest abortion provider. "In yet another sign of his willingness to respect religious convictions, the president has amended the Affordable Care Act in relation to the availability of birth control," Bashir insisted, puffing the president as a magnanimous compromiser when it has been the president's own administration that has put religious organizations into a needless dilemma regarding their First Amendment freedoms in the first place.

Opening a segment today on the Obama administration's latest overture to assuage concerns of religious organizations about the ObamaCare contraception mandate, MSNBC host Alex Wagner came out swinging with a patently false assertion that survives as a liberal meme to this day.  "The great 2012 debate over women's health concerns begot all-male hearings on contraception and a national smear campaign directed at a Georgetown Law student," Wagner noted as she introduced a clip of Rush Limbaugh's criticism of Fluke's "testimony" last February before the House Democrats' steering and policy committee.

But in point of fact, the Feb. 16, 2012 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearings did include two women who testified on the issue of religious freedom and the ObamaCare mandate. Both of them, Dr. Allison Dabbs Garrett and Laura Champion, M.D., voiced no moral objection to birth control per se, but testified rather in opposition to the mandate and how it would force their schools to cover abortifacient drugs like Plan B.

Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival featured a documentary celebrating four “amazing” abortionists who evacuate wombs in the third trimester of pregnancy. The critics in attendance loved it. The Philadelphia Inquirer boasted it drew “two standing ovations -- one for the doctors.”

Sundance attendees in Utah were greeted by police and armed sheriffs in green jumpsuits that made a show of force outside the the theater. They had to have their bags searched and were inspected with hand-held metal detectors. After the movie was shown, two police officers stood at the front of the auditorium as the directors and the four abortionists featured in the film answered audience questions.

When it comes to discussing religious objections to President Obama’s contraception mandate, MSNBC decided this afternoon that prominent feminist and liberal darling Sandra Fluke is the best person to comment.  Speaking with Tamron Hall on the February 1 NewsNation, Fluke appeared on MSNBC to hype, “the [Obama] administration's process of clarifying how women will have access to this important health care service."

Fluke, a Georgetown Law student who "testified" before a Democratic policy committee -- not a congressional panel contrary to popular belief -- became a recurring guest on MSNBC, and even spoke at the Democratic National Convention last year.  According to Politico, under the new policy announced by the Obama Administration [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here]:

It’s hardly a new revelation that the media turn a blind eye towards the annual Washington, DC March for Life, and, according to Live Action President Lila Rose, the bias by omission exists to “cover up” abortion. 

Rose described the media bias to the Culture and Media Institute’s Katie Yoder in an interview Friday, saying, "So there should be more media reporting on [the march], absolutely. And sadly, there's a bias in a lot of media to cover this up. To cover up abortion to not talk about it." 

Fact usually triumphs over fiction – except on TV news. The major networks have been obsessed with Manti Te’o’s fantasy football story of a fictional girlfriend. But when 500,000 people showed up in Washington to speak out for the unborn, it was barely a footnote. ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted close to two-and-a-half hours (147 minutes and 43 seconds) to the Te’o fiasco and just 17 seconds to the Washington, D.C., March for Life.

That’s 521 times more coverage for Te’o and a girlfriend who never even existed.

On the January 25 broadcast of MSNBC’s The Cycle, 9/11 Truther and liberal commentator Touré Neblett “thank[ed] God” that abortion was there to save him from unwanted fatherhood with a girlfriend who was "just not the one."  "[I]n some ways that choice saved my life," the MSNBC host insisted in his closing commentary, seemingly remorseless for how that choice cost an innocent human being his or her life.

Noting that last Tuesday marked 40 years since the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade,  Touré argued that there’s “something undeniably misogynist about the impulse to deny a woman's dominion over her own body and limit her ability to shape her life – and impose another sense of morality on her.”  So, when did respecting and protecting innocent life become “misogynist”?

Every January tens of thousands of people participate in the March for Life in Washington at the anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. And for five years in a row the New York Times failed to run a single story on the march in its print edition (it marked the 2011 march with a couple of photos on page 12).

This year, the 40th anniversary of the March, the Times broke its streak with a so-so 815-word story by Ashley Parker that made the bottom of the front of the paper's National section, on page 9.

It's not very often that a federal judge begins a ruling by saying that "Sometimes even a person with excellent vision does not see the forest for the trees." That happened yesterday in a case involving former First District Democratic Congressman and sore loser Steve Driehaus, whose district mostly comprised the western two-thirds of Cincinnati's Hamilton County. Yet it's not news at Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

After his 2010 defeat at the hands of Republican Steve Chabot, Driehaus sued the Susan B. Anthony List in federal court  for defamation and -- get this -- "loss of livelihood." Why? Because, during that campaign, SBAL told Driehaus's constituents -- correctly, it has since been proven -- that his vote for ObamaCare was a betrayal of his pro-life principles. Yesterday, despite his obvious conflict of interest as former president and director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Cincinnati, Judge Timothy Black, a Barack Obama appointee, found a way to do what he should have done in the first place, and rejected Driehaus's nonsense. 

In a Wednesday Salon column which should be saved onto the hard drives of everyone in the pro-life movement as a reminder of the fundamental evil of their opposition, Mary Elizabeth Williams stated why, to her, it doesn't matter that abortion involves the taking of a human life: "I believe that life starts at conception. And it's never stopped me from being pro-choice."

The establishment press has consistently refused to apply the "pro-life" label to a movement which has always been not only about ending abortion, but about respecting and protecting human life from conception to natural death. I believe that refusal has occurred because many reporters share Ms. Williams's brutal, strongly held but rarely expressed beliefs articulated after the jump. The Salon staff writer proves that her side richly deserves to be called "anti-life" -- because that's what they are (bolds are mine throughout this post):

The annual pro-life march, this year marking the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision, drew tens of thousands to Washington, DC on Friday, but didn’t garner a syllable of coverage on Friday’s World News on ABC nor the CBS Evening News. Yet on Saturday night, both newscasts highlighted a pro-gun control protest in DC which CBS anchor Jim Axelrod pegged at drawing “close to a thousand people.”

The NBC Nightly News noted both protests and on Friday night also reported how a federal appeals court unanimously decided that President Obama violated the Constitution when he made recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, a rebuke neither ABC nor CBS found newsworthy.

The NBC series “Parenthood”’ has drawn raves from TV critics this season for a storyline about a fortysomething mother fighting cancer. Then on January 1, NBC asked viewers to tune in the following Tuesday for an “unforgettable” new episode. A teenager would get an abortion at Planned Parenthood. Such is NBC’s definition of “parenthood.”

Drew, one of show’s leading teenager characters, has an ex-girlfriend named Amy who comes back to tell him “I’m pregnant.” The high school seniors go to the Planned Parenthood clinic, and the scene plays like a political commercial.

The annual March for Life has gone on every year in late January since January 22, 1974, the first anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The March, which turns out thousands every year, marked its 40th anniversary on Friday with yet another march. By no means is it an ad hoc protest that happens to come together.

Yet in noting the event in a "weekend in politics" roundup on Yahoo! News's "The Ticket" blog this morning, writer Phil Pruitt failed to mention the march's name, and suggested that it merely "coincides with the 40th anniversary" of the infamous court case. By contrast, in a subsequent paragraph Pruitt described a pro-gun control march scheduled for Saturday by name, noting that  residents of Newtown, Connecticut would be in attendance to push for new gun control measures (h/t email tipster Matt Shedor):

Leave it to MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts to attempt to smear the pro-life movement on the day of the March for Life with a misleading story about a law introduced in New Mexico regarding abortion. Roberts erroneously reported on a New Mexico state legislator named Cathrynn Brown, who, “introduced a bill that would force rape victims to carry their babies to term and their babies would be used as evidence during a court trial… Under the bill, a rape victim who had an abortion would be thrown in jail for tampering with evidence.”

Roberts brought on Pat Davis, the Executive Director of Progress Now in New Mexico to bash the bill, which, by the way, Roberts completely mischaracterized. What the bill actually would do is make it a crime for a rapist to pressure his victim into undergoing an abortion.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

Today is the 40th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., a day that is likely to pass with limited, if any, notice from a national news media which is hostile to the pro-life cause. While the abortion issue has divided Americans for the past four decades, journalists have consistently come down on the pro-abortion side of this debate.

It’s a bias some reporters freely admit. “I think that when abortion opponents complain about a bias in newsrooms against their cause, they’re absolutely right,” Boston Globe legal reporter Ethan Bronner told the Los Angeles Times back in 1990. “Opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists...is not a legitimate, civilized position in our society.”

Thinking of learning a new language? Try English – broadcast media style. Specifically, try abortion-reporting speak – a tongue as notable for the words it doesn’t use as those it does.

This year’s annual March for Life, this Friday, Jan. 25th, marks the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. And, though you might think it would be difficult to talk about something called the March for Life without using the word “life,” the broadcast networks have shown the utility of abortion-reporting speak. In the past 10 years, 91 percent of ABC, NBC, and CBS anchor reports on the March for Life and Roe v. Wade failed to mention the word, “life.”

In the 40 years since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, more than 56 million children have been legally killed in the womb. By it’s own accounting, the nation’s largest abortion mill, Planned Parenthood, performed a record high 333,964 abortions in 2011 alone, even as it was cutting back on the other women’s health services it likes to tout. (It provided more than 100,000 breast-health services that year.) And the current administration is the most unapologetically pro-abortion in history.

But to hear Andrea Mitchell tell it, abortion rights are in danger of being snuffed out in the U.S. On the Jan. 22 anniversary of the court’s decision, Mitchell’s painted a dire picture for abortion supporters on NBC “Nightly News.” (That NBC included the report at all is to its credit. ABC and CBS failed even to note the anniversary.) Video after the break

Supreme Court reporter Ariane deVogue of ABCNews.com covered the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in a strange and very slanted way: in light of how an "abortion backlash persists" and the high court will rule on “gay marriage” in the coming months. At this point, her liberal experts are willing to admit Roe was too broadly decided – at least in terms of how it unintentionally spurred a vibrant pro-life movement and elected conservatives like Ronald Reagan to office.

All of deVogue’s quoted experts were looking for a way for the Supreme Court to give the leftist LGBT lobbyists a victory without helping conservatives in any political way:

Reporting on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Tuesday, CNN's Carol Costello pelted a pro-life guest with liberal talking points while chiding the president of pro-choice NARAL for not doing enough for the pro-choice movement.

For example, Costello began her interview with pro-life ethicist Pia de Solenni by citing poll numbers favorable to abortion rights activists. In contrast, she greeted NARAL president Nancy Keenan with this bland observation: "You know, it's interesting, you wanted us to refer to your organization as Pro-Choice America. And I have read numerous articles that your organization doesn't like the term 'pro-choice' any longer."

As MSNBC marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Andrea Mitchell continued the MSNBC tradition of praising the abortion rights movement and harassing the pro-life movement.  On her January 22 program, Mitchell treated Sarah Weddington, the attorney in Roe v. Wade to a cream puff of an interview, while Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, was grilled.

Dannenfelser was the first pro-life guest on MSNBC's programming on Tuesday, the 40th anniversary of Roe. By contrast, by the 1 p.m. Eastern hour, pro-choice advocates had appeared on various MSNBC programs, all to sympathetic interviewers. Among these guests were Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, current NARAL Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan and former NARAL chief Kate Michelman.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

As many of you are doubtless already aware, the "Roe" in Roe v. Wade, Norma McCorvey, converted to Christianity in the mid-1990s and became a pro-life activist, repentant of her role in the lawsuit that 40 years ago today legalized abortion.

So you'd think that any interview with McCorvey's attorney before the Court, Sarah Weddington, would include at least one question about McCorvey's change of heart. But alas, that wasn't in the cards with TIME magazine's Valerie Lipinski in her January 22 interview with Weddington. Indeed, the entire affair was a succession of softball question after softball question, concluding with a query about whether Weddington ever goes back to listen to audio recordings of her arguments before the Supreme Court (emphasis mine):

On Saturday's Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, during a discussion of the 40th anniversary of the Roe Vs. Wade Supreme Court decision, panel member Nia-Malika Henderson of the Washington Post asserted that it is a "real problem" that many parts of the country do not have abortion clinics.

She went on to fret that younger people are not interested enough in the issue and recommended that "feminist groups and pro-abortion groups have to find a way to engage them and educate them because they're going to be the ones that are on these grassroot levels and at the state levels..."

On January 23 the Style channel will premiere a new reality series, Big Rich Atlanta. It’s a take off of Big Rich Texas, which is take off of the various Real Housewives series, none of which I’ve watched more than a few minutes, because everything about them makes me sad – the plasticity, the exploitation, the shallowness – everything. I just keep thinking to myself, “These poor people so need Jesus.”

But I digress. At least one of the two stars of Big Rich Atlanta merits attention, Meagan McBrayer. Meagan is the daughter of abortionist Daniel McBrayer, who has a chop shop in the Atlanta, Georgia, suburb of Marietta.

It’s a favorite liberal tactic: If you’re losing an argument, just change the terms of the debate, let your media water-carriers adopt the new language and confuse the public. So, days before the fortieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, Planned Parenthood unleashed a new video campaign that not only attacks pro-life language, but also pro-choice terminology.

Planned Parenthood’s latest campaign, Not in Her Shoes, aims to remove Americans’ identity as “pro-life” or “pro-choice” in favor of emphasizing women’s personal choice depending on the situation. Not in Her Shoes introduces its mission by stating, “Abortion is a deeply personal and often complex decision for a woman to make … Nobody knows a woman’s specific situation — we’re not in her shoes.”

In a minute-long news brief on January 16, Michael Pope of Washington, D.C. public radio station WAMU misled listeners by noting that in 2012 Virginia Republicans passed and Gov. Bob McDonnell signed into law a bill requiring invasive transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions in the Old Dominion.

"The legislation passed, and now Alexandria Delegate Rob Krupicka, a Democrat, is co-sponsoring legislation to repeal it," Pope noted. The only problem, however, is that the legislation was amended before passage to scratch the requirement for transvaginal ultrasounds while still requiring abortion-seeking patients to obtain non-invasive abdominal ultrasounds. As the Reuters news wire reported on Feb. 29, 2012 (emphasis mine):