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You mean the media didn’t want to report about aborted babies stuck in toilets and plumbing?

You mean the media didn’t want to report about aborted babies stuck in toilets and plumbing?

Marc Lamont Hill admits (to his credit) the obvious about the Gosnell news blackout

Erik Wemple, a media-focused columnist at WaPo, notes a frank assessment from Marc Lamont Hill:

In a HuffPost Live segment today on the issue, host Marc Lamont Hill made clear where his theoretical thinking lay:

“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.”

Strong words from a host on a left-leaning outlet.

Strong words, but true.

The fear of how knowledge of abortion procedures would play on the larger issue of abortion rights explains, in part, the Gosnell mainstream news blackout, despite attempts to obfuscate.  Defenses that feminists led the way in reporting about Gosnell or pro-lifers drove women to Gosnell are unfounded.

Carl Cannon writing at Real Clear Politics, Abortion: Journalism’s Most Sacred Cow:

Gosnell’s actions pull back the curtain on this procedure and allow Americans to  contemplate a disquieting prospect: that abortion itself is an inherently  violent act, the grisly details of which remain hidden even from the patients in  the operating room — and that if those specifics were truly understood, public  support for it would wane.

Those grisly details were acknowledged on a conference call organized by pro-abortion groups ostensibly to deflect criticism based on Gosnell’s conduct.  From Tim Carney:

When the pro-choice group RH Reality Check hosted a conference call today on abortionist Kermit Gosnell, the speakers focussed entirely on the substandard care Gosnell provided the mothers. But violating sanitation regulations is not really why Gosnell is on trial. He’s been charged with killing people — mostly babies.

So I asked the call participants, “What is the distinction between what he did, and what a late-term abortionist like, say, LeRoy Carhart does?”

Tracy Weitz, associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, explained: “When a procedure that usually involves the collapsing of the skull is done, it’s usually done when the fetus is still in the uterus, not when the fetus has been delivered.”

You see, headlines like this don’t play well, Gosnell Worker: Toilets Backed Up With Body Parts From Abortions (h/t Hot Air):

Former abortion clinic worker James Johnson testified today during the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell and provided jurors with a nauseating account of the horrific conditions at the abortion facility.

Johnson worked as a janitor, maintenance man and plumber of sorts and he was the common-law husband of 51-year-old Elizabeth Hampton, who is Gosnell’s wife’s sister. He told jurors some of the morbid details that appear in the grand jury report — including how he threatened to quit working at the abortion clinic because he refused to pull any more flesh from aborted babies out of the plumbing.

His job was to collect abortion remains and take them to basement — but he eventually refused to participate and bags began piling up.

He told the jury toilets backed up one-two times a week and said he opened the outside clean out pipe and fetal parts such as babies’ arms came spilling out.

Johnson said he scooped up body parts with shovel and put them in a bag that was taken to rat infested basement. Johnson said a cat kept at the Gosnell clinic was there to deal with rat infestations that kept happening. He said the at pooped in plants all over clinic.

Doesn’t play well, at all.

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Comments

What can I say … some people just don’t like small children.

Hollywood hasn’t made a worse horror story.

Why do you think Collectivist students and faculty destroy pro-life displays as “profanity”?

Reality is a form of heresy to the Collective. Images of reality are an argument they cannot tolerate. Will not tolerate.

Little human bodies are a very “inconvenient truth” respecting abortion.

    There are two problems. First, an unwanted child interferes with a mother or father’s dreams of material, physical, and ego gratification. Second, a child born to an irresponsible mother or father will ultimately be a burden on the welfare (i.e. involuntary exploitation or redistributive change) state, which not only the Left, but most people, can only mildly tolerate. The Left, however, not only promotes irresponsible (e.g. dysfunctional) behavior, but they exploit the peculiarities of people’s base nature for democratic leverage. This, incidentally, is what people consider “smart political economics.”

    Think of the children… or something.

    Liberty is only suitable for women and men capable of self-moderating behavior. Only a small minority ever enjoy immunity from the consequences of irresponsible behavior.

      Ragspierre in reply to n.n. | April 17, 2013 at 3:04 pm

      “Only a small minority ever enjoy immunity from the consequences of irresponsible behavior.”

      I would say that any such “immunity” is illusory. We never escape consequences, though they are often mediated.

      People learn, however, and if their conduct were more linked to what they were facing, they would exert MUCH greater self-control.

The biblical standard to distinguish between inert biological matter and a life is a “living soul”, which can be reasonably correlated with the emergence of consciousness or neural activity.

And the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and He breathed into his nostrils the soul of life, and man became a living soul.

In the spirit of equal protection, perhaps the same objective standard we use to establish death can be applied to establish life. This would still give the unhappy mother or father between one and two months to decide the fate of the newly conceived human life.

“The fear of how knowledge of abortion procedures would play on the larger issue of abortion rights explains, in part, the Gosnell mainstream news blackout….”

Yeah, those larger issues get blamed for a lot of news blackouts, such as the ones about

John Edwards’ affair
Barack Obama’s campaign financing
Bimbo eruptions

and attempts to spike stories, such as
the Swift Boat Veterans’ opposition to slander by John F’n Kerry

Funny how those larger issues have to do with support for a political party. If it were Pravda doing this, our news media would have no problem recognizing the problem as corruption.

Our national public debate is not well-served by a dishonest press. I say report the news and let the pieces fall where they may.

Is it so much to ask that the overwhelming norm be to bring children to term? Is the imposition on the mother so great that we must continue to prefer these little shops of horror? What a bargain our judges, doctors and United Way white washers have made for us.

Sorry, I won’t give Marc Lamont Hill an inch. He’s a race baiting asinine windbag.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-lamont-hill/15-overrated-overrated-white-people_b_1948679.html

I think his opinions are intended to cause controversy, whether true or not. His manner of thinking is revolting to me. I’m rather appalled you are even giving him a moment of consideration on this blog, Professor. But better, I suppose, that the 1st Amendment is exercised to highlight the inanity of most social progressives.

Lost in the shouting etc of the pro- and anti-abortion sides are several facts about the context. First of all, choice to have or not have a child optimally takes place prior to conception. Why? Second fact: pregnancy isn’t an accident, isn’t a random act of uncontrollable forces or other people’s behavior; it’s the mother and father whose act(s) create the human life. If you try to wait until after conception, then the choice you have are (a) kill a baby; (b) give birth to the baby. If you consider and decide before conception, you only have to deal with you and your partner’s thwarted sexual impulses (that assumes you have heard of birth control). Yes, there are rapes; yes, there are pregnancies which are life-threatening to the mother – e.g., entopic pregnancy – there are conditions which develop during pregnancy which can cause the death of the child and the mother/or the mother. Friends, in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade, approximately 54 million babies were aborted. Do you really think there were 54 million rapes, incest-caused pregnancies, medical conditions genuinely threatening the mother’s life? Really? Honestly? Now think about it – before or after? Self-restraint or murder. We have, as a nation, opted to legally permit babies to be murdered rather than require women – yes, and men as well – to control their sexual impulses. No surprise; we are in the process of giving marriage recognition to people who chose to have sex with their own sex and so why should abortion surprise me; right?