As a reminder of how obscenely biased taxpayer-supported National Public Radio really is, see the notice its honchos sent to its staff last week about how to use terminology with regard to abortion.
Every single word-usage option is resolved in favor of language preferred by those who support liberal, widespread access to legalized abortion, against those who would further restrict the practice. Throughout the notice, the tone drips with contempt for pro-lifers.
For example, with regard to a law recently enacted in Georgia, NPR editors insist [our emphases added], “Proponents refer to it as a ‘fetal heartbeat’ law. That is their term. It needs to be attributed to them if used and put in quotation marks if printed.”
Likewise, NPR rejects the commonly used and widely understood phrase “partial-birth abortion” to describe a procedure in which the child is partially delivered outside the womb before its skull contents, still inside the mother, are then vacuumed out.
Instead, its directive orders reporters to “use the term intact dilation and extraction to describe the procedure, or a procedure known medically as intact dilation and extraction;… Also, it is not correct to call these procedures RARE — it is not known how often they are performed. Nor is it accurate to use the phrase LATE TERM ABORTION. Though we initially believed this term carried less ideological baggage when compared with partial-birth, it still conveys the sense that the fetus is viable when the abortion is performed.”
Thus, only the pro-life terminology is thought to carry “ideological baggage.” And heaven forbid that people be informed that in almost all cases of partial-birth abortion, the “fetus” is indeed at a point in gestation where most babies are “viable.”
Also: “NPR doesn’t use the term ‘abortion clinics.’ We say instead, ‘medical or health clinics that perform abortions,’ which is just a less descriptive and more verbose way of saying “abortion clinics.”
Moreover: “The term ‘unborn’ implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a ‘baby’ or ‘the unborn’ is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion.” So NPR doesn’t know where babies come from — they just appear upon birth.
This is all risible, but in a purely malignant way. Again, note that there is not a single word of warning against using terms preferred by those people, commonly known as “pro choice,” who favor abortion. For example, NPR seems perfectly fine with the term “abortion rights,” allowing its use repeatedly, even though those who would restrict abortions, usually known as “pro-life,” argue that no such right exists.
But to use “abortion rights” is to take the pro-choice side even more than “fetal heartbeat” takes the side of pro-lifers. Indeed, the latter is a reasonably neutral term: The internal organ of the fetus is a heart, and it is beating at a point early in pregnancy.
Also, note just how odd it is to insist on the cumbersome, deliberately obscure verbiage of “intact dilation and extraction.” In almost every other circumstance, journalism style manuals advise in favor of plain English rather than little-understood technical terms and jargon. For example, no editor alive would tell his reporter to call an internal-organ procedure a “laparoscopic cholecystectomy” rather than “gallbladder surgery.”
It is only when speaking of abortion, when plain English lays bare the reality of the procedure, that opaque technical medical terms are suddenly preferable.
In sum, NPR’s word usage regarding abortion shows invidious and inherent bias against heartland values, and it’s a bias that contradicts ordinary journalistic ethics. It is a leftward bias also evident in much of NPR’s other reporting. Taxpayers should not be asked to finance a single penny of such bias. The only thing that needs to be aborted is federal funding for NPR, whose overwhelmingly wealthy listeners are certainly in no need of the handout.
