TV Networks Avoid Using \"Partial-Birth Abortion\" in Supreme Court Story
TV Networks Avoid Using "Partial-Birth Abortion" in Supreme Court Story
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 22, 2006
New York, NY (LifeNews.com) -- All three of the major networks avoided
using
the term partial-birth abortion when reporting last night on news that
the
Supreme Court agreed to hold hearings on a Bush administration request
to
uphold the national ban on the grisly abortion procedure.
According to the Media Research Center, a watchdog group, some networks
went
so far to avoid saying "partial-birth abortion" they came up with
tremendously awkward methods to describe the procedure that involves
partially birthing and then killing an unborn baby.
CBS News' Bob Schieffer introduced the program with a graphic reading
"Late-Term Abortion" over his shoulder, even though the abortion
procedure
is performed midway through pregnancy.
Schieffer said the court was weighing a challenge to "the ban that
Congress
imposed on a kind of late-term abortion that critics call partial-birth
abortion."
Over on NBC, anchor Brian Williams asked: "Can the federal government
outlaw
late-term abortions?"
Williams won the award for the night for the most convoluted
description of
partial birth abortion, calling it "A late term abortion procedure that
opponents of it call 'partial-birth abortion.'"
Over on ABC, anchor Elizabeth Vargas stuck to the simpler "so-called
partial-birth abortion" verbiage, MRC reported.
Meanwhile, MRC's Brent Baker said CBS News was guilty of using code
words
from the abortion industry to describe the ban.
"After CBS reporter Wyatt Andrews touted how former Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor had 'protected' the women's health exception, anchor Bob
Schieffer
saw not the potential now of new 'protections' for the unborn, but
instead
worried about new 'restrictions' that may be 'imposed' on abortion,"
Baker
said.
Not veering off course from the pro-abortion bias of former anchor Dan
Rather, Schieffer even repeated unfounded warnings from pro-abortion
groups,
asking Jan Crawford Greenburg of the Chicago Tribune: "So does that
mean
this is going to be the beginning of the end of legal abortion in this
country?"
Greenburg set Schieffer straight, saying, "No, there's still five
justices
on the court who would vote to uphold Roe versus Wade, which guaranteed
a
woman's right to an abortion."
Some reporters almost got the story straight, according to the MRC
report.
ABC reporter Jake Tapper detailed what happens: "The law in question is
President Bush's ban on certain procedures where the fetus is at least
partially removed from the womb before its aborted."
CBS's Wyatt Andrews reported how "three years ago, Congress, hoping for
this
very day, passed a law it called the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act,
making
it a crime for a physician to deliver, quote, 'a living fetus,' and
then
essentially kill it."
"Is that like being 'essentially' pregnant?" Baker asked.
Related web sites:
Media Research Center - http://www.mrc.org