You’d think that after working fulltime in the pro-life movement for over a decade, the perniciousness of the media’s pro-abortion bias would be old news to me. Once in a while, however, a story showcases again the extent to which the public is lied to. Exhibit A is a recent piece in the New Zealand Herald, titled “Abortion tragedy: Couple left to terminate pregnancy at 25 weeks after midwife misses two ultrasounds.”
When I first spotted the headline, I assumed that by “abortion tragedy” the Herald was referring to a story such as the recent case in Ireland of parents who aborted a baby they were told had a fatal fetal abnormality before being told, after their child had been killed, that he’d been perfectly healthy. But no – this was not that sort of “abortion tragedy.”
This is the story of a young couple who made the “gruelling decision to terminate their first pregnancy at 25 weeks after a midwife failed to read two earlier ultrasounds showing significant abnormalities.” You’ll notice that the article says the couple terminated a “pregnancy” rather than a baby, although obviously it was the child who suffered from abnormalities rather than the pregnancy. The article continued: “If the scans had been read by the midwife, problems with the pregnancy would likely have been picked up four weeks earlier.”
The couple was upset because they were “forced to make a decision on an abortion,” although they were not forced to make any such decision. They were under no obligation to consider having their child killed just because the baby wasn’t physically perfect, and it is frankly disgusting that the Herald wants us to believe that they were. The couple did, however, decide to abort their baby, which the Herald calls a “tragic loss” as if the couple and the abortionist had nothing to do with the child’s gruesome demise.
