The Infanticide & Abortion Media Blackout
| Published April 30, 2014 |

By Mary Alexandra Pooler
Thursday Review contributor

A Utah woman was arrested in mid-April in connection with the bodies of seven infants found in her home. She gave birth to all seven, strangling six of them in an act of infanticide—the seventh was stillborn.

A Pennsylvania woman was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for killing her own child in August 2013. She delivered her baby boy in a sports bar bathroom, smothered him, stuffed him in a bag, and crammed him into a toilet tank. She then returned to the bar to finish watching a game and socialize.

In March 2014, a woman was killed from a botched abortion at Preterm Abortion Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. It took 20 minutes for an ambulance to get her to a hospital, and she died before making it there.

And then there’s the case of Kermit Gosnell.

Gosnell was an abortionist in Philadelphia who was convicted in 2013 of killing infants born alive by snipping their spinal cords with scissors. His clinic went unregulated and unchecked by state officials for 17 years despite the fact that many complaints were made against it. Feral cats roamed the halls dropping feces all over the clinic, unsanitary and corroded equipment were used for procedures, fetal remains were crushed in the clinic’s garbage disposal, and Gosnell kept the feet of the infants he killed in jars.

The reports of Kermit Gosnell sound like an anti-choice urban myth; but it’s not. It’s a real life American horror story. So why haven’t we heard more about it?

The answer is simple. Crimes such as those of Kermit Gosnell, the Pennsylvania woman, and the Utah woman point to a seriously flawed logic in the liberal attitudes behind abortion. The idea of “safe and legal” abortion seems ludicrous when someone like Gosnell went protected by state health officials for so long. Women’s “reproductive rights” seem grisly when Utah mother Megan Huntsman killed her children moments after birth, where moments before, those same rights and actions were completely legal, acceptable, and worth defending. And the supposed “war on women” seems to dissolve when outrage about Gosnell’s treatment of women is coming far more from the right side of the debate than the left, who more than ever remain silent.

As a result of us living in a country where political correctness often determines what is heard in the mainstream media, stories of poor clinic conditions, deaths from abortion, infanticide, and even grislier truths—like the fact that fetal remains are being burned for electricity—often go unreported. Fetal remains have been used in electrical generating processes in several places, most recently in Portland, Oregon, where country facilities, in partnership with Convanta, an energy-from-waste firm, use medical waste among the 500-plus tons of solid waste it receives each day, according to ABC News.

The facts of abortion are often gruesome. People are offended to see photos of fetal remains on college campuses, so it’s understandable that they would be horrified by these stories as well. But in creating a media blackout where abortion deaths go unreported, and infanticides are ignored, we’re creating a culture of contentment where we put the ease of our readership above exposing the truth—akin to something the people in Germany probably lived through during the Nazi regime.

The story of Kermit Gosnell should have made national headlines. Reading the grand jury report, one has to wonder how many incompetent journalists and agenda-defending editors live amongst our free press, that such a crime was deemed un-newsworthy. Kermit Gosnell jeopardized the lives of women, went around consent and waiting period laws, and even killed some his patients. The abortionist went on to defend his actions, calling himself a hero for women and a combatant in the war on poverty. It’s believed that over a 40 year period, Gosnell killed hundreds if not thousands of babies born alive by snipping their spines after birth. He truly would be a hero to liberal pro-choicers, if only he’d done his crimes a moment sooner. Victims of injustice deserve to be memorialized in every case. Culprits of evil crimes deserve to be exposed to the public, whether it’s a Disney employee, a Catholic priest, or an abortionist.

The media wants women to be unafraid of getting an abortion, but with people like Gosnell, maybe they should be a little afraid, if not at least cautious. Women need to be informed about their bodies, about their rights, and about clinic conditions. As a woman, I would want to know if an ambulance had to transport the patient of a botched abortion to a local hospital. I would want to know if that patient died. But reporting these stories might create a doubt in the mind of potential patients, and with a doubt in their mind, women may not fork over the $350 for the procedure to abortion giants like Planned Parenthood.

Gosnell’s trial was a pivotal case in the post-Roe v. Wade era. It revealed important facts and questions about legal abortion in America. It made us consider what made late-term abortionist George Tiller a hero and what made Kermit Gosnell a convicted serial killer. Testimony at Gosnell’s trial was so disturbing, it even made a pro-life advocate out of trial reporter JD Mullane.

These stories poke holes in the argument of bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom if people took the time to seek them out. They force us to face the reality that there is little difference between legally requiring a mother to care for her born infant, and legally requiring a mother to care for her child in utero. The horror stories of abortion and infanticide are very real in our country. As Americans, we must accept that as long as the media is silent on them, there will never be an intelligent and informed discussion on human rights. It is the job and duty of the free press in America to lift the veil of impassioned rhetoric to present facts, testimonies, and statistics—a job that it is largely failing at.

This is why pro-life media outlets have become a powerful voice in journalism with at least three national outlets publishing stories on a daily basis. They cover a variety of topics: women’s health, clinic safety regulations, revelations in human development and bioethics, and even stories of recovery from victims of rape, trafficking, and forced abortions. One story involves Ashley, a 14-year-old who rejected abortion after being impregnated by her rapist. Another shares the beauty of raising children with disabilities, and provides resources for parents who have lost a child soon after birth.

I challenge everyone, whether pro-life or pro-choice, to make a commitment to be informed on the issues they’re defending. Follow LiveAction or LifeNews for just a week. You will be exposed to stories you would otherwise never see because when it comes to abortion and the mainstream media; ignorance is too often bliss.


Sources cited for this article:

Kermit Gosnell: New York Times, May 15, 2013.

Medical Waste Used in Power Generating Plant: ABC News, April 24, 2014.

Kermit Gosnell, Grand Jury Report; Misc. No. 0009901-2008.

Raising Children With Disabilities; Disabled Children Have So Much to teach Us; October 14, 2011.