The major television networks virtually completely ignored the vote yesterday in the House, which saw Democrats defeat a bill that would have banned sex-selection abortions in the United States.
Ken Shepherd, at Newsbusters, has details on the one network newscast to cover the ban and vote — delaying it until the overnight hours when few viewers were watching.
Yet news of the vote was not delivered on either the May 31 broadcast network newscasts — ABC’s World News, CBS’s Evening News and NBC’s Nightly News — nor on the June 1 morning news programs — ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s This Morning and NBC’s Today.
For her part, Paula Faris, anchor of ABC’s World News Now(broadcast at 3 a.m. EDT) did inform her few viewers of the vote, dismissing it as “a bit of election-year political theater.” She did, however, note that some countries with more liberal abortion laws than the United States actually have bans on sex-selection abortions:
This is a law, gendercide, is a law that is being practiced in Canada, in Finland, in Norway, in Sweden, in Switzerland, countries that are very, very pro-abortion, pro-abortion rights, and they needed a 2/3rds majority though to get this one passed.
What’s more, Faris added:
A little stat for you. They say that the practice of killing baby girls, or terminating pregnancies solely because the fetus is female is estimated to have produced a gender imbalance of more than 100 million girls around the world.
“Horrifying story, that part of it, anyway,” co-anchor John Muller replied.
Paul Wilson, writing at Newsbusters, says the networks are ignoring the videos while Fox News has done numerous segments on the expose’.
The broadcast outlets have completely ignored the controversy: ABC, CBS, and NBC have not devoted a single second of their May 29 evening broadcasts and May 30 morning broadcasts to coverage of the recent Live Action videos.
Left-wing outlets have gone into damage control, spinning the Live Action sting as a manufactured controversy. Jezebel called it a “terribly dumb sting operation,” and said “statistics do not indicate that the U.S. has a problem with sex selection abortions.” Think Progress claims Planned Parenthood quickly fired the employee responsible.
However, the liberal Huffington Post interviewed a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman who asserted that “no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions.” In other words, Planned Parenthood will provide abortions for any reason, including for the purposes of eliminating a child of the “wrong” gender.
On May 29, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly did a segment with Lila Rose, the head of Live Action, on the findings in the video. Rose explained the shocking nature of Live Action’s findings: “If you watch the full tape, they go on for minutes. I mean, the whole counseling session’s fifteen minutes. They go on about the different ways to determine gender, the different ways to select for abortion, the ways to kill a little girl.”
But such findings were not newsworthy, according to the networks.
Wilson says the networks were quick to report the dustup between Planned Parenthood and Komen but are ignoring the videos showing it okaying sex-selection abortions.
Live Action president Lila Rose appeared on the Fox News “O’Reilly Factor” program on Tuesday night to expose the new video her group released showing a Planned Parenthood staffer encouraging a sex-selection abortion.
The video shows a Planned Parenthood staffer encouraging the woman to obtain a late-term abortion because she was purportedly carrying a girl and wanted to have a boy. The video is the first in a new series titled “Gendercide: Sex-Selection in America,” which Live Action tells LifeNews will be exposing the practice of sex-selective abortion in the United States and how Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry facilitate the selective elimination of baby girls in the womb.
A second video released today shows staff at a Planned Parenthood abortion business helping a woman determine if her unborn child was female so she could have a sex-selection abortion. The video is the second in a new series titled “Gendercide: Sex-Selection in America,” exposing the practice of sex-selective abortion in the United States and how Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry facilitate the selective elimination of baby girls in the womb.
In the video, Planned Parenthood social worker Randi Coun advises the woman on an early, definitive method to tell the gender of her child in the late first or early second trimester: “So if you were to have what’s called a CVS test, which is, do you know what that is?” she asks, referring to the genetic Chorionic Villus Sampling test. “It’s done between 11 and 13 weeks, so it is a test that you could do now.”
CVS tests have a risk of miscarriage of about 1 in 100, which Coun did not mention, and are typically done to test for genetic disorders in a pregnancy.
Coun also reassures the woman that she can carry her pregnancy further into term before her abortion.
“An abortion at any stage up to 24 weeks is considered a safe procedure,” she asserts. “It’s not that it’s unsafe, or that there’s a lot more risk involved, it’s just there’s more steps involved and it’s just a little more complicated.”
Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Center in New York City does abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy and is the organization’s national headquarters.
“I can tell you that here at Planned Parenthood we believe that it’s not up to us to decide what is a good or a bad reason for somebody to decide to terminate a pregnancy,” Coun adds.
