As both Matthew Balan and Mark Steyn have noted, the mainstream media has for the most part gone missing in reporting the murder trial of late-term Pennsylvania abortionist Kermit Gosnell.
Gosnell, his wife Pearl, and eight employees stand accused of murdering seven newborn abortion survivors and one mother. Not only has MSM gone missing, when it does report on this horrendous story, it often gets important details wrong or makes inexplicable gaffes.
For instance, journalist MaryClaire Dale reported in a March 20 Associated Press story:
[Employee Adrienne Moton] once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, “At first I didn’t.”
Abortions are typically performed in utero.
“Abortions are typically performed in utero”? Where else are they committed? While it is true fallopian tubes are the other site a preborn baby may be killed due to an ectopic pregnancy, this was certainly not the context here. Nor does anyone ever parse a generalized conversation abortion to that specificity.
The context here was that a baby was murdered ex utero – outside the uterus, after delivery. And apparently in certain scenarios this is acceptable, according to Ms. Dale?
Perhaps Ms. Dale believes, as does Barack Obama, that abortion survivors may be legally killed in accordance with a mother’s wishes to terminate her pregnancy.
Speaking of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, reporter Joseph Slobodzian of the Philadelphia Inquirer failed when reporting:
After the federal government banned the rare, so-called “live-birth” abortion procedure in 2007, late-term abortion providers like Gosnell switched to Digoxin, a heart drug, to kill the fetus in the womb. The remains are then removed from the woman.
Although I appreciate that Slobodzian called them “remains,” rather than “pregnancy” or “contents of the uterus,” it was the “partial-birth” abortion ban that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007. The Born Alive Act was signed into law in 2002.
At least the AP and other news outlets are getting better at calling abortion survivors babies rather than fetuses.