When abortion became the law of the land in 1973 with a fiat from the U.S. Supreme Court, the first thing I did was go to the library and look through the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature.
I checked out most of the magazines and secular journals to find what they had been saying about abortion during the past decade or so, and I found that the stories were almost always slanted toward the legalization of abortion.
Coverage of events such as Sherry Finkbine’s highly publicized abortion in 1962 was mostly pro-abortion. Finkbine, hostess of the then popular Romper Room, had taken thalidomide—which could cause fetal defects—and Finkbine feared that she would have a deformed baby.
When her story went public and she was denied an abortion in Phoenix, she went to Sweden for an abortion. The media took her side, and abortion for fetal defect became “reasonable.”
More stories followed and the secular media had set its course.
We could cite hundreds of such stories, always with a pro-abortion slant or outright support. The secular media cheered Roe v. Wade in 1973 and has never steered away from this course.
There were occasional articles pointing out this bias, even by writers in the secular press, but while they were noted, they were mostly ignored. The abortion bias continues to this day.
A recent example appears in a Newsweek article by Nancy Hass. It concerns 32-year old Jennie McCormack, an unmarried mother of three who finds herself pregnant with her fourth child.
She lives on $250 a month child support and says she can’t afford another child, believing it would be unfair to the other three children to have a fourth.
But she can’t afford to travel for an abortion, can’t find anyone to care for her children if she could travel, and lives among Mormons who are against abortion.
The story is pure grist for Hass. Jennie finally gets her sister to obtain the abortion pill, RU-486.
Jennie thinks she is 12 weeks along, but she is closer to 18 to 21 weeks. She miscarries, but the size of the fetus scares her, and she calls a friend. The story gets out and the authorities are informed.
Jennie is charged with breaking a 1972 Idaho law that makes it a crime for a woman to induce her own abortion. This crime is punishable for up to five years in prison.
Her case was eventually dropped for lack of evidence, but the story goes on, and Hass uses every possible incident and graphic description of Jennie’s plight to impose on the reader the idea that abortion is in fact the only solution to her quandary.
So even though her article, “The Next Roe v. Wade?” presents itself as an attempt to show that Jennie’s case puts both sides of the abortion battle in a quandary, it is ultimately an effort to make pro-lifers look like heartless, selfish bad guys and make abortion supporters look like the real compassionate people.
The secular press, after nearly 40 years of legal abortion, has never seen the truth of the matter. The question is, will they ever?