Of course, by "pro-life extremists," the PBS "To the Contrary" host means anyone who has ever called abortion what it is -- the killing of an unborn baby:
Let George Tiller's murder be the last straw. It is time for America's pro-choice majority to stop standing idly by as extreme so-called pro-life advocates murder obstetrician-gynecologists (OB/GYNs) who are providing women with the legal right to terminate pregnancies. I am careful to note I am referring here to EXTREMIST pro-life advocates, people who refer to abortion as "baby-killing" and other inflammatory rhetoric. I am explicitly not referring to mainstreamers who object to abortion due to religious beliefs, but who refrain from using inflammatory speech.
In other words if you're pro-life but meek to the point of avoiding the abortion debate, Erbe doesn't consider you an extremist. But use accurately harsh language to describe the accurately harsh reality of what abortion is and you are an extremist who eggs on some to political terrorism.
Of course Erbe is quite familiar with inflammatory rhetoric, frequently flicking her rhetorical flamethrowers on to singe pro-lifers such as student activist Lila Rose, whom Erbe wanted to be prosecuted on trumped-up charges. As my colleague Matthew Balan noted in an April 27 NewsBusters post:
The US News blogger then posed “three questions for prosecutors who are now considering investigations into the Planned Parenthood operations in some of the six states where Rose posed as something she was not.” Actually, only the first two were directed towards the prosecutors:
1. Why don’t they investigate Rose for trespassing, fraud, and whatever other law she violated by posing as something she was not to make the videos?2. Why don’t state authorities prosecute her for violating state privacy laws by videotaping private counseling sessions? According to the L.A. Times:
In May 2007, Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles accused Rose of breaking state privacy laws when she secretly taped her interactions. It demanded she remove the videos from her website, which she did, though they are still easily found on YouTube. (Arizona, Indiana, and Tennessee, where she went next, have less restrictive privacy laws.)So Erbe wants Rose to be prosecuted for something that her colleagues in the mainstream media do all the time with investigative journalism. In fact, the Big Three networks, like Rose, used hidden camera footage from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in “exposes” in 1991.
It’s something that even left-wing politicians have dabbled in to target crisis pregnancy centers. For example, a 2007 front-page article by the aforementioned L.A. Times detailed how Representative Henry Waxman “asked undercover investigators to contact 23 crisis pregnancy centers.” According to a press release, Waxman’s investigators “posed as pregnant 17-year-olds,” and were supposedly “misled...about the medical risks of abortion...that abortion leads to breast cancer, infertility, and mental illness.” One would guess that Erbe had no problem with these hidden camera videos, since pro-lifers were the subject.
