CNN caught heat from conservatives Tuesday for publishing a report that refers euphemistically to a newborn baby as a “fetus that was born.”
As it turns out, though, CNN is not even close to being the first newsroom to deploy this nonsensical term to refer to newly born infants. There is a long history of newsrooms deploying this dystopian gobbledygook in service of promoting the “pro-choice” line, which relies on denying the humanity of both unborn and newborn children.
The Associated Press reported in 1999 that Wisconsin officials argued in court that a man should be prosecuted for attempted murder based on the “born alive” rule, which, according to the Associated Press, “says that a person can be charged for injuries to a fetus that is born alive.”
Congressional Quarterly reported in 2001 that supporters of a bill banning the cloning of human embryos argued the measure would prevent “the deliberate destruction of fetuses that are born alive, often during botched abortions.”
The Associated Press in 2008 defended then-Sen. Barack Obama’s opposition to born-alive bills, arguing that Illinois already had legislation “protecting aborted fetuses that were born alive and were considered able to survive.”
At what point, exactly, do we stop referring to them as “fetuses that were born alive”? When it no longer complicates the “pro-choice” argument?
National Public Radio in 2008 also hosted journalist Cynthia Gorney, who argued that born-alive bills proposed in the Illinois legislature “would have made an explicit crime for failing to protect a fetus that was born alive.”
HuffPost reported in 2013 that a federal law signed by George Bush “extends legal protections to fetuses that are born alive after attempted abortions.”
The Daily Mail reported in 2015 that a bill to defund Planned Parenthood would “be followed up by another bill that would criminalize non-compliance with a 2002 law that protects fetuses that are born despite an abortion attempt.”
The Associated Press in 2015 reported on a legal case where a “fetus was born alive 22 weeks into the pregnancy, but died less than two hours later.”
The child was alive for two hours and we are still calling it a “fetus”?
States News Service reported in 2019 that an “anti-choice” bill introduced by the Wisconsin Legislature would require “health care providers to care for a fetus that is born alive during an abortion or face a $10,000 fine and up to six years in prison.”
And so on.
Honestly, the biggest problem with the article that CNN published on Tuesday is not its choice of dystopian wordplay to deny the humanity of newborn children. The biggest problem is that its headline refers to two pro-life measures that failed this week in the U.S. Senate as “abortion restriction bills,” which is an outright lie. The bills mandated only that infants who survive abortions be provided the same medical care as any other newborn child. CNN, however, reports that the bills “would require abortion providers to work to ‘preserve the life and health’ of a fetus that was born following an attempted abortion …”
“Child.” The word they are looking for “child.”
Or are we still doing that thing where we pretend not to know the moment when an unborn child becomes a newborn infant?
