Anyone who has been involved in the pro-life movement for any length of time knows or suspects that the mainstream news media are generally unfavorable to the pro-life cause.
However, a closer look at the issue reveals that the news media’s position extends beyond one of unfavourability into the realm of outright bias and hostility. There are numerous examples of this.
In this two-part series, we will take a closer look at media coverage of the abortion issue in the United States and Canada with a view to identifying this bias and hostility. We will also attempt to determine why this state of affairs exists and suggest what can be done about it.
A good starting point for our analysis might be to look at how the media have covered the issue of abortion and violence in recent years. As we all know, the shootings of abortionists and affiliated personnel have drawn massive amounts of coverage, culminating in the reportage of a rampage in suburban Boston, Massachusetts last December in which two people were killed and five injured. This event was made into the top news story -even in Canada- and continued to claim front-page coverage for a couple of days afterwards as the inevitable reactions from the pro-abortion forces were heard in copious amounts.
Previous to this, however, there were several other well-publicized incidents of violence in North America which included:
November 1994: Garson Romalis, who performed abortions, was severely wounded in the leg by a bullet fired from a high-powered rifle as he sat at his breakfast table in Vancouver. There are still o suspects in the case.
August 1994: Gordon Watson was charged with assault and contempt of court in connection with an incident outside a Vancouver abortion clinic.
July 1994: John Britton and his escort, James Barrett, were shot to death outside a Pensacola Florida abortion clinic. Paul Hill was convicted with murder charges and for violation of a clinic-protection law.
August 1993: Abortionist George Tiller was short in both arms as he drove from the parking lot of his clinic in Wichita, Kansas. Rachelle Shannon was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
March 1993: David Gunn was shot dead outside a Pensacola, Florida clinic. Michael Griffin was convicted of the shooting and was sentenced to life in prison.
May 1992: Henery Morgantaler’s abortion clinic on Harbord Street in Toronto was severely damaged by a fire-bomb.
When all these incidents are listed successively, they make for a rather impressive, and perhaps troubling list of attacks against so-called abortion providers. However, it is worth keeping in mind that the U.S. toll in two years is five dead and six injured during a period of time when the U.S. as a whole experienced between 45,000 to 50,000 murders, according to official statistics.
In Canada there has yet to be a conviction against a pro-lifer on an abortion related charge of violence, outside of a minor assault conviction on Gordon Watson. This makes one wonder all the more why Canadian news media have publicized incidents of abortion-related violence as much as they have.
It’s also worth nothing that a vast majority of the tens of thousands of U.S. murders went unreported outside the cities where they occurred and most certainly, they were unreported in Canada. So why, then, were the murders of the abortionists so prominently played up? One can speculate that perhaps the media personal have granted abortionists a status above that of the rest of the population, which would be far from the truth.
Let’s take a closer look at the incidents of abortion-related violence in the U.S. with a view to determining the characteristics they actually have, rather than the ones the mainstream news media would have us believe they posses.
It’s notable that none of the incidents or abortion-related violence in the U.S. were linked; the persons convicted of committing them were not associated with each other, nor were they members of mainstream pro-life groups when they carried out their acts.
The Vancouver Sun for example, noted that in the case of Michael Griffin: “Investigators found no evidence of a conspiracy in the shooting death of (the) doctor outside the abortion clinic.”
In reference to incidents in the U.S. where abortion clinics have been bombed, the Toronto Star quoted Special Agent Jack Killoran of the Beureua of Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco in Washington D.C. as saying “No pro-life organization that we know of has any ties to these bombings. . . No conspiracy (theory) survives the arrests we have made.”
Kiloran added that most attacks against abortion clinics in the United States have been carried out by “lone wolves” who may or may not have been involved in pro-life activity. He said the attackers have “an urge to be part of a major public debate. Some of them are people who just need to be famous. (The clinic) becomes a visible target. Some are not well mentally.”
Kiloran’s latter observation certainly appears to have been the case with both Michael Griffin and John Salvi. The Vancouver Sun reported that Griffin’s wife had once obtained a restraining order against him because he had physically tried to throw her out of the house and was verbally and emotionally abusive to their minor daughters. She also said he had suffered from great fits of violence.
Salvi, meanwhile, was described as “an oddball” by his employer who observed that the young hairdresser “looked like he was ready to go off” after an incident in their salon about a week before the Massachusetts shootings. And a former classmate of Salvi’s said most of the students in her class “agreed he was pretty weird.”
Even pro-abortion groups have acknowledged that incidents of violence can’t be linked to pro-life groups. Ann Baker, the head of a New Jersey-based pro-choice research service, said only one-third of attacks against U.S. abortion clinics have resulted in arrest and none of the incidents could be directly linked to organization groups.
Meanwhile, all prominent U.S. pro-life organizations have been unanimous in condemning violence. Following the murder of David Gunn for example, Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry called the killing an “inappropriate, repulsive act.”
Joe Scheidler of the Chicago-based Pro-life Action League has described violent pro-lifers as loners, adding “I think (violence) is strategically wrong and it’s not helpful to the movement or to our image . . . There’s no organization that I’ve even known that would support a bomber.”
After the Massachusetts shootings, the U.S. National Right to Life Committee – the nation’s largest pro-life group – issued a statement which said “The National Right to Life Committee condemns today’s clinic shooting in the strongest possible terms.” All the major Canadian pro-life groups also condemned the shootings.
Despite all these mitigating factors, however, the news media in both the U.S. and Canada have heavily publicized incidents of abortion-related violence creating the impression among a not-to-well-informed public that the violence can be linked to the movement as a whole rather than a restricted few individuals who committed the acts.
The media’s approach to the coverage of abortion violence in the United States becomes even more puzzling when one examines many related incidents which have not been publicized widely. The numerous incidents, of course are either examples of violence against pro-lifers or of occurrences which cast abortionists and those sympathetic to abortion in a bad light.
Most of the following examples, in reverse chronological order, were culled from the pages of the New York Times and, for whatever reason, the majority of them were not publicized outside of New York. There may well be many more examples of which we do not know:
November, 1994 : Steven Brigham, who replaced murder abortionist John Britton in Pensacola, began facing malpractice hearings in New Jersey last November. An administrative court heard charges of negligence and incompetence regarding his treatment of two women from New Jersey and one from Pennsylvania who paid him to perform second-trimester abortions.
In the first case, medical records showed Bringham failed to suture a laceration in the woman’s cervix and delayed getting hospital help for her until she had lost a great deal of blood and was going into shock.
In the second case, Bringham’s instruments caused a 10-centemeter perforation in the woman’s colon and uterus. In the third case, a woman suffered an infection and high fever and was admitted to a hospital’s emergency room for treatment. It was reported that Bringham had been banned from practicing medicine in Georgia and Pennsylvania and had his license under review in California.
Meanwhile, New York abortionist Allen Kline, who also went to Pensacola, had $1.2 million in damages assessed against him after a 13-year old girl died following an abortion he performed on her.
A spokesperson for Legal Action for women, a nonprofit group which encourages women to recover damages from physicians who injure them during abortions, say 250 U.S. women have filed lawsuits against abortionists and clinics since 1985.
October 1994: Ernest Robinson, 22, was charged with second-degree murder after pro-life protester Richard Mahoney was shot at while demonstrating outside the Delta Women’s Clinic in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was alleged Mahoney escaped injury after Robinson missed with his first shot and had his gun jam on the second.
Late 1994: Illinois abortionist Richard Ragsdale and his wife were accused by the state attorney’s office of child pornography involving their three-year-old foster daughter.
August 1994: New York city abortionist David Benjamin was charged with second degree murder after it was alleged he performed an illegal abortion on a 33-year-old woman and then allowed he to bleed to death without offering medical help. Benjamin is believed to be the first New York state physician to be charged with murder in the course of the medical practice.
Benjamin’s license had been revoked two months earlier because five women he treated had suffered life-threatening perforation if the uterus. In 1985, Benjamin had been found guilty of 47 charges of medical misconduct in the cases of 11 female patients.
June 1994: In Pensacola, Florida, 31-year old Pamela Coulson died from blood loss blood loss caused by a perforated uterus and a lacerated uterine artery during abortion.
April 1994: Abortionist Thomas W. Tucker had his license revoked in Jackson, Mississippi after the state board of medical licensure found him guilty on 32 of 34 charges of unprofessional and unethical conduct. He faced the same accusations in Alabama and was also under criminal investigation in both states after the deaths of several patients.
In one case, a woman died in 1991 after Tucker refused to call an ambulance when she began bleeding profusely. He also ordered a coworker to falsify records related to the matter. In April,1994, another woman died in Alabama after having a birth-control device removed at one of Tucker’s clinics.
In Mississippi, Tucker was accused of crushing the skull of an infant who was born alive. “It just never happened” claimed Tucker in response. “My job in terminating a pregnancy in the second trimester routinely involves crushing the skullcap to remove its tissue.”
June, 1993: New York abortionist Dr. Abu Hayat, 63, was sentenced to between nine and two-thirds and 29 years in prison for performing abortions after the 24th week of pregnancy. A jury found him guilty of assault on the fetus and her mother, who was between 30 and 32 months pregnant at the time. The baby was eventually born with her right arm sliced off.
A jury also found Hayat guilty of assault on another patient and of falsifying records to cover up his action. A court heard that Hayat stopped an abortion midway through in order to demand an additional $500 in payment from his patient. When the woman could not come up with the money, he threw her out of his office while she was bleeding and semi-conscious. The woman nearly died of an infection afterwards.
More than 30 women came forward later to say that Hyat has botched their abortions as well, while New York’s state health department reported on that a 17-year-old girl died after Hyat perforated her uterus during an abortion.
Hyat was the fifth New York city abortionist to have had his liscense revoked by the state health department in three years.
January, 1992: Fifty-seven- year-old Ming Kow Hah was arrested as he prepared to perform an abortion while his license was revoked. New York state medical authorities had previously found Hah worked in a grossly incompetent manner and took away his license for incidents which included leaving the head of a fetus inside a patient.
We can see that even from these selected examples, more women have been killed and injured by abortions in the U.S. in the last several years than abortionists killed or injured. Yet no one would ever know it because, for some reason, all of the publicity and national news coverage has surrounded the latter incidents. (Next month, the state of the media in Canada)
