March On Media Rally: ‘Real War on Women’ is Media Silence on Abortion

(CNSNews.com) – Pro-life activists held a rally outside of ABC Studios in Washington, D.C. Thursday to “demand honest reporting” and to protest “the mainstream media’s censorship of the truth regarding abortion.”

The rally was hosted by Live Action, a non-profit pro-life organization.

Over 53 million abortions have been performed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court decided to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade and over one million abortions are performed each year, noted Christian Robey, political director at Media Research Center, the parent company of CNSNews.com.

“Now is the time for the media to cover both the facts and also the culture of death that surrounds this grisly industry,” Robey said, criticizing major media networks ABC, CBS and NBC for “lavishing praise on their hero, Wendy Davis” and devoting “three times as much coverage to lauding Wendy Davis as to covering the atrocities of so-called Dr. Gosnell.”

Davis, a state senator from Texas, made headlines in June for her 11-hour filibuster of a bill banning late-term abortions that was drafted in response to abuses at Gosnell’s abortion clinic in Philadelphia. Despite the protest, which drew hundreds of abortion supporters to the statehouse, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act into law after it passed in a special session.

This week, when asked about the case of abortionist and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell, Davis told a reporter she was unaware of the details of the case. Lila Rose, president of Live Action, found Davis’ revelation “shocking.”

“This shows the bubble that pro-abortion advocates live in where they’re not addressing, they’re not seeing the real problem of what abortion is doing to a child, tearing apart pain-capable children, and what abortion is doing to women, how it endangers women to have abortion clinics set up without basic surgical standards that would protect them, sometimes when their lives are even at risk,” she told CNSNews.com

“We were promised that abortion would empower us as women,” Rose continued. However, “a woman walks into an abortion clinic in a position of disempowerment, feeling suffering and alone, and abortion has wreaked havoc on women’s bodies, physically, emotionally, mentally and psychologically . . . It doesn’t empower us, but it actually disempowers us.”

CNSNews previously reported on encounters with legislators who pointed to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy instead of sharing their personal views on viability. According to Rose, “there are going to be any number of excuses by politicians who don’t want to take a stand for protecting basic human rights and the viability standard will be one of them.”

“It’s amazing to see how young children can survive outside the womb now because of medical technology, but viability shouldn’t be a standard to determine human rights. Just because a child is dependent or a human being is dependent on medical technology doesn’t mean that is not a person that deserves to be protected,” said Rose, who also mentioned that additional undercover videos– similar to those that rocketed the then-18-year-old UCLA student to national prominence – will be released soon.

During the rally, Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, noted that abortion presents serious risks to women. “You are 35 times more likely to die from an abortion at 20 weeks than you would in the first trimester, and yet Wendy Davis doesn’t think that’s relevant to talk about on the floor of the Texas Senate,” Yoest said.

Commenting on differences in media coverage between Davis and the Gosnell trial, Yoest stated, “I call sexism. I call sexism and real bias in covering a woman’s issue by talking about Wendy Davis’ pink shoes.”

“There is a real war on women in this country today, and it is the silence, it is the silence of the media on what is true about abortion,” Yoest added, citing the case of Karnamaya Mongar, a woman who died in convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic. The National Abortion Federation “investigated Kermit Gosnell’s clinic… and they wouldn’t certify the clinic because it was so gruesome, but they said nothing.

“When they [women’s groups] say they’re pro-woman,” Yoest challenged the media, “Ask, what do you mean by that?”

Other speakers at the rally highlighted the language the media uses in the coverage of abortion cases that “play games with language to drive their agenda – a ‘baby’ for what is desirable and wanted, a ‘fetus’ for something which is a problem or unwanted. One is a blessing, the other a problematic clump of cells,” Robey noted.

“There’s a range of choices that one might call those who survive abortions – ‘child,’ ‘baby,’ ‘neonate,’ ‘newborn,’” agreed pro-life activist Jill Stanek, “but ‘fetus’ is scientifically and grammatically incorrect, and journalists, of all people, should know this.”

Ryan Bomberger, founder of The Radiance Foundation, told activists that he was born as a result of the rape of his mother, challenging the notion that “what abortion tells women is that you’re not strong enough to overcome any circumstance.”

“Sadly the American public suffers from systematic misinformation by an institution that should be telling the truth but chooses instead to tell us lies,” Bomberger said. He later quoted Walter Williams’ “Journalist’s Creed,” saying, “I believe that suppression of the news for any consideration other than the welfare of society is indefensible.”

He added, “Today’s news media chooses agenda over actuality, opinion over objectivity, and advocacy over accuracy.”

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