Liberal Media Calls Unborn Babies “Babies,” Except on Stories About Abortion

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Aug 11, 2020   |   9:40PM   |   Washington, DC

As with so many other things, the liberal media has a double standard when it comes to the lives of unborn babies.

Often, news outlets call them fetuses while defending abortion as a “woman’s right to choose.” They claim unborn babies’ heartbeats are “imaginary” and question that late-term unborn babies can feel pain.

But when a story does not involve abortion, these same news outlets sometimes refer to unborn babies as babies and attribute to them the value that they deserve.

Get Religion blogger Julia Duin noticed this in several recent stories at the New York Times and Washington Post, which are among the largest newspapers in the U.S.

“Those opposing abortion have been complaining about media fickleness on the issue for a long time and it’s hard to gainsay their point: What’s in the womb at 24 weeks is a fetus if you abort it; a baby if you keep it,” Duin wrote.

As an example, she pointed to a recent Washington Post article about a woman who gave birth to twins in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in March.

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“A pregnant woman with COVID-19 was dying. With one decision, her doctors saved three lives,” the headline read.

Those lives included Ebony Brown-Olaseinde’s unborn twins, who were born prematurely at 28 weeks. According to the report, she and her husband struggled with infertility for three years before they conceived the twins, a boy and a girl.

Deemed to have a high-risk pregnancy, Brown-Olaseinde and her doctors celebrated when she reached 24 weeks. According to the report, “Ebony’s doctors told the couple that she’d reached an important milestone: At 24 weeks, their twins were viable, more likely to survive if they arrived early.”

The wording is significant because it implies that her unborn babies were babies. However, Duin found another Washington Post article from just a year ago that referred to unborn babies at the same gestation as “fetuses.” The article was about late-term abortions.

“Apparently the designation depends on whether the mother wants the kids or not,” Duin wrote.

The New York Times is guilty of the same double standard. Though its editorial board supports abortion and its journalists often describe unborn babies as “fetuses,” some stories recognize the reality that unborn babies are babies.

According to Duin’s research, the Times published an article earlier this month about a mother who lost one of her unborn twins during the coronavirus outbreak. It described her as “a 34-year-old woman carrying more than one child.” At 25 weeks of pregnancy, the woman learned that one of her twins had died.

The Times reported: “’I was hysterical,’ Ms. Sample said. After a more thorough examination, this physician said the baby had died within the previous three days and noted, with evident sadness, that the death probably could have been prevented had she seen Ms. Sample sooner.”

These stories are significant because influential newspapers acknowledge that babies in the womb are valuable human beings who are worthy of medical care, worthy of saving, and worthy of mourning when they die. They are not just “fetuses” that can be disposed of because a woman is not ready to be a mother yet. They cannot be both valuable and not valuable.

Inadvertently, when news outlets publish such stories, they acknowledge the truth that abortions destroy unique, living children – children who are valuable and worthy of protection. If only they would realize that every child in the womb, wanted or unwanted, is just as deserving of a right to life.