News media, others swallowed abortion lie hook, line and sinker

Web-posted: Thursday, February 27, 1997

f more sheep are cloned, don't be surprised if some come out looking like modern journalists.

When I started this job a few decades ago, a veteran columnist at the next desk offered advice. One rule was: "Never write about a subject when you're mad. Wait until you calm down."

Sensible words, and I usually try to follow them.

But on this day, there weren't nearly enough hours left until my deadline for me to calm down about a whopper of a lie that a public figure named Ron Fitzsimmons has finally admitted telling.

Fitzsimmons runs the National Coalition of Abortion Providers.

And he says his conscience has nagged him into admitting "lying through my teeth" when he made public statements in 1995 that the controversial "partial birth abortion" was rarely used. And that it was used only when a woman's life was in danger or the fetus was already severely damaged.

You probably remember the big debate on this issue. Those against this late-term procedure wanted it outlawed because they said it killed healthy, normal fetuses that were well into full development.

And the procedure is barbaric, they said. The fetus is partially delivered feet first, then a device is used to suck its brain out to collapse the head.

Fitzsimmons now admits that most such abortions are done on women who are healthy and fetuses that are healthy, but not because the woman is in danger or the fetus is unhealthy.

The abortion is performed for the same reason as other abortions: The woman wants it.

Fitzsimmons says he and others lied because the truth might have hurt the cause of abortion rights.

They were right. If it hadn't been for those lies, eagerly accepted and passed along as gospel by the printed press and broadcast news, President Clinton would not have dared veto a bill that outlawed the procedure. And Congress wouldn't have buckled and failed to override his veto.

That's what is so infuriating: the silence of those in the medical field who knew it was a lie but failed to thunderously refute it.

And the willingness of the press to accept the lie and pass it along as fact. If more sheep are cloned, don't be surprised if some come out looking like modern journalists.

A few physicians spoke up. Two wrote a piece for the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal that shredded the line peddled by people like Fitzsimmons. But they were ignored, probably because the Journal's opinion sections are viewed by the rest of journalism as hopelessly conservative.

The press swallowed the lies like worms by a bass because the lies fit so neatly into what is sometimes referred to as a "world view" that is shared by those in the mainstream news media.

Part of that view seems to be that anyone who questions the need for the vast number of abortions performed each year is some kind of right-wing, bomb-tossing, gun-toting religious nut.

So when those who present themselves as social progressives say that only women who face death and fetuses who face life as vegetables are involved in partial birth abortions, the press is comforted and lets it go at that. Heaven forbid that the newsroom should offend any of the "don't tell me what to do with my body" crowd.

It isn't the first big lie that the media have bought and resold.

Some years ago, gay organizations and public health people launched an intense "We're All at Risk" campaign. This meant that we were all equally vulnerable to the threat of AIDS.

Common sense and existing evidence said otherwise: If you didn't have anal intercourse with a man or borrow a needle from a dopehead, what put you at risk?

But those who launched the propaganda campaign later admitted that they believed the fear would create sympathy for gays and spur increased spending on AIDS research.

Eventually, a few skeptical reporters shot holes in the campaign. But not until others who questioned it had been labeled bigots and homophobes. One journalist who wrote a book on the subject lost his newspaper job, and his book, despite impressive hardcover sales, couldn't attract a paperback publisher. It was politically correct censorship.

More recently, there was the media hysteria over the burning of black churches. Remember? Night riders were thought to be galloping all over the country, burning black churches. A massive racist conspiracy, possibly inspired by the oratory of political conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

Clinton, concerned frown and all, visited churches and recalled similar evil arsons in Arkansas when he was a youth--memories that turned out to be pure fiction.

Proposals were made to use federal funds to rebuild churches. Rich do-gooders kicked in money to organizations that made the most victimization noise.

Turned out it was more smoke than fire. After the nation's press spread the arson story, calmer heads took a closer look. Most of the fires weren't arson. No conspiracy. Black arsonists as well as white arsonists were arrested, proving that a nut is a nut, regardless of color. It was as if no one in an American newsroom knew that an old wooden rural church can actually have bad wiring. Not when Jesse Jackson is dishing out hot quotes about the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan.

Now we have Fitzsimmons blowing the whistle on himself. His conscience? Or was it that the truth was going to come out anyway?

Maybe from people such as the anti-abortion physician who will be the subject of Friday's column.

© 1996 Chicago Tribune