Mainstream Media in 'Vegetative State' When it Comes to Reporting on Abortion

January 22, 2006

Arizona Daily Star columnist Jim Kiser wonders what it is that allows conservatives such as former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Arizona State Rep. Pamela Gorman “to believe they have the right to legislate proper medical practice.”

Reading between the lines, leftists and their allies in the media simply do not believe anyone connected with the government should have any say in the abortion death industry. For just about any other matter, they revere government as a god.

In a recent column, Kiser chastised Ashcroft for his role in fighting Oregon’s assisted suicide law and he took Gorman to task for supporting fetal pain legislation.

One can thus assume that leftists would not welcome government regulation calling for anesthesia if someone attempted to rip off their arm, thrust a pair of scissors into the back of their neck or douse them with saline solution. Of course, they would scream for government regulation to prevent such horrors. But when the abortion industry is involved, all government regulation bets are off.

The media bears much of the responsibility for the abortion holocaust of the past 33 years. Reporters and columnists across the fruited plain have perpetuated the admitted lies of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League and former director of the largest abortuary in New York. He admits making up phony statistics dealing with public support for abortion and phony numbers on the number of abortion deaths prior to Roe v. Wade. The media took those lies and ran like Carl Lewis with them. 

If someone even hints at stricter regulations for the abortion industry, the Kisers of the media bias world are quick to cry foul.

Take any issue aside from the culture of death, and leftists care little about states’ rights. They favor a big government nanny state in which a humanistic government controls as much of our lives as it can get its mitts around. But forbid that anyone should dare tamper with Oregon’s euthanasia law. It seems remiss that the mainstream media is loathe to investigate the euthanasia racket. Some of the people who have asked others to kill them suffered not from terminal illness; they were merely depressed. And while suicide is illegal, it’s legal in Oregon to ask someone else to do you in.

Kiser hammers on Gorman for “trying to legislate how doctors practice medicine” while pre-born babies suffer a worse fate than we allow pre-born eagles. To Kiser, Gorman is the villain because she realizes she isn’t going to stop abortion in Arizona, but the least she can do is speak up in favor of anesthesia for the defenseless human victims. Pamela, don’t you know how politically incorrect it is to tamper with the sacred cow of abortion? These doctors love inflicting pain on women and their unborn children … so let them be without interfering.

Interesting, it is, that researchers say many women object to abortion, but feel pressured and coerced to kill their pre-borns. Relationships depend on it. Yet these same women often regret killing their children and suffer harms that the mainstream media has left to the scholarly journals. To protect the sacred cow and cover for the butcher Biskinds of the abortion world, leftists direct attention at those who actually respect human life. This is a tragedy. In short, the work of the mainstream media in covering the abortion industry in four decades is abysmal. Do journalism professors really teach students in intro classes that the abortion industry is hands-off, or does it only seem that way?

Kiser says it is hard to believe that Gorman is concerned with the “well-being of women who may learn later in life about the pain they may have caused their unborn child.” The history of the mainstream media’s reporting on the well-being of post-abortive women can be told in two words: doesn’t exist. You won’t read in the big dailies in Tucson or Phoenix the extent that women actually do suffer from abortion. You won’t read about the psychological trauma, the post-abortion stress syndrome, ruptured uterus’s, RU-486 complications, abortion-breast cancer link, pelvic cancer, suicide, child abuse and a whole host of additional problems well documented by social science research. It doesn’t fit the agenda of the mainstream media. Ripping on conservatives like Ashcroft and Gorman is clearly what it’s all about.

Postscript: Tonight Fox 10 News in Phoenix reported that Michael Schiavo has re-married and his former wife Terri Schiavo was in a "vegetative state for more than 10 years." How appropriate. When it comes to reporting on abortion, the mainstream media has been in a "vegetative state" for the past 33 years.

Dennis Durband is publisher and editor of The Arizona Conservative, is also a freelance writer and webmaster and a longtime journalist. He enjoys mountain biking, distance running, hiking, camping, photography and reading Chuck Colson books.