By Judie Brown
Half-truths and outright lies saturate today’s news reporting, particularly when the media is talking about Planned Parenthood’s affection for abortion. This topic engenders a kind of hyperbolic condition previously unknown in the news business.
For example, Media Matters, which monitors all news through the lens to leftist propaganda, recently published a story under the headline “How a Right-Wing Media Myth about Planned Parenthood Could Hurt Florida’s Fight against Zika.” The blog post tells the reader: “Since the release of deceptively edited videos from the discredited Center for Medical Progress, anti-choice legislators have repeated misinformation about Planned Parenthood and the essential services it provides as part of an ongoing attempt to defund the organization. To justify these attacks, legislators have relied on the right-wing media talking point that community health clinics can effectively fill the gap left by denying Planned Parenthood access to funding and resources.”
In other words, this often-cited website bases opinions and reporting on the contrived utterances of those who have failed to recognize truth since the beginning of their war on women and the preborn more than 40 years ago. They do not agree that abortion kills a person because that fact is bad for business.
The clear truth is that nobody needs to justify the accuracy of the Center for Medical Progress reports and documented videos; the record speaks for itself.
Having said that, we know that propaganda sells for Planned Parenthood. This is why, when Indiana’s governor Mike Pence signed into law a bill that will require women to have an ultrasound at least 18 hours before going through with an abortion, the media took its talking points directly from the culture of death/Planned Parenthood playbook. Characterizing the plight of poor women and the fact that making two trips to an abortion facility might be difficult, the press appears to be oblivious to the fact that the only reason Planned Parenthood opposes this new bill is that—oh no!—the expectant mother might see a baby in the ultrasound and change her mind, thus denying big bucks to the abortion giant.
Another report explained that the 72-page lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood stipulated that the new law “has no medical justification and creates an undue burden on a woman’s right to obtain an abortion protected by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
There it is again. The pro-abortion cartel’s suggestion that there actually is a constitutional right to kill one’s baby prior to birth is proclaimed without question. The statement is woven out of invisible cloth, but who is challenging that contention? Does the media present the argument to the contrary? Of course not.
And yet legal opinions on the subject by Supreme Court justices themselves contradict the lie. Justice William Rehnquist, who dissented from the original Roe and Doe decisions in 1973, wrote: “To reach its result the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment.”
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has defined the alleged “right” to abort a child putative, or in common parlance, an assumption that has become acceptable even though it has no foundation in the natural law or common sense.
The point is this: Every time the unengaged pubic hears or sees examples of the fallacious rhetoric of those who embrace killing the innocent by describing it as choice, the ignorance level grows deeper. Unlike you and me, most Americans do not take the time to dig in and discover the facts, and, sadly, that includes mothers who have actually had babies and still believe that abortion is a “right.”
How do we offset this sad reality? The answer is in education—one person at a time.
American Life League’s Culture of Life Studies Program, American Life League’s youth outreach Life Defenders, and American Life League’s Stop Planned Parenthood International are but three avenues readily available to help you teach the truth. By doing so, we will explode these myths and deliver people out from the veil of ignorance.
Propaganda feeds ignorance; truth enlightens and emboldens.
