Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com, and with a special note to my friends here who act like this is all a rhetorical exercise: This shit is real. Anti-choicers have succeeded in criminalizing pregnancy and in enlisting news stations to help them in that. This could be you or someone you care about next.
Nothing inflammatory here!
Last month there was a big buzz in the local anti-choice rumor mill about a “born alive abortion” that had allegedly occurred at a Phoenix clinic. I reported on the absurdity of the whole allegation at that time and how the MSM ought not allow themselves to be played by wild-eyed anti-abortion zealots. But, apparently, Channel 12 in Phoenix sees a real public interest in helping those zealots to harass abortion providers and in giving out potentially identifying information about a patient (her age), as they did on the Thursday 10pm broadcast.
The police reports shows the mother, 27, had been scheduled for an abortion, but went into what the report called, “spontaneous labor.” The doctor at the clinic near downtown Phoenix told police she had checked for a fetal heartbeat before the procedure and found none. She said she believed the baby would be stillborn.
The reports said a nurse went to weigh the fetus, which is standard procedure, and thought she saw it move and struggle to breathe. “Oh my God this fetus is moving,” the reports claim she said.
Staff at the clinic then called 911 and paramedics began CPR while transporting the baby to Banner University Medical Center, the report said. But doctors there did not find a heartbeat and pronounced the baby deceased within a few minutes.
Under federal law, abortion clinics have to provide medical care to a baby that survives an abortion.
“Nobody did anything wrong,” Kat Sabine, executive director of the Arizona chapter NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Absolutely, nobody did anything wrong. The doctor, in fact, did everything right.”
So it appears that this was not even an abortion but a stillbirth that happened to take place at a clinic, where the staff there did everything they were supposed to do in that situation. 12 News could have left it at that and redeemed themselves with a mea culpa for having been suckered by anti-choice conspiracy loons. Sadly, no, they could not do that. Instead, they ended the segment by interviewing some gross anti-choice dude from his book-lined office and let him insinuate that something criminal had indeed taken place at that particular clinic and also that any pregnancy outcome that is not a full-term healthy infant is cause for suspicion.
Pro-life activist and lawyer John Jakubczyk said the uproar wasn’t over whether the abortion was legal, though he has questions about that. He said it was a moral protest.
“Maybe the child was born and only lived for a moment, maybe the child lived for a lot longer than a few moments. I don’t know,” Jakubczyk said. “But I do know this; you had a human being who was born, you had a human being who died.”
It is truly chilling to realize how successfully anti-choicers are enlisting local news stations in their crusade to criminalize women’s health care.