The Tulsa World and the 'Contents of the Uterus'

"Political language," George Orwell
observed, "is designed to make lies
sound truthful and murder respectable."

On the issue of abortion, the bias shown by the so-called mainstream media is well known. I've long pointed out the pro-abortion bias of the Associated Press, for example, and today my friend Tony Lauinger chastises the Tulsa World for its news coverage of a 2015 Oklahoma law banning dismemberment abortions.

Dismemberment, you may recall, "is the standard procedure for second-trimester abortions," as WORLD magazine reporter Courtney Crandell explained in 2015. "Abortionists can't use aspiration abortions at that stage in the pregnancy because babies' skeletons already have formed. Instead, they tear the babies apart to remove them, collecting the pieces afterward to ensure the womb is empty."

"The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would," bleeding to death while being torn apart, Justice Anthony Kennedy once explained. It's small wonder the bill passed the Oklahoma House by a vote of 84-2 and the Oklahoma Senate by a vote of 37-4. (What's shocking is that six lawmakers actually voted against the prohibition. Two of them, Rep. Emily Virgin, D-Norman, and Sen. Kay Floyd, D-Oklahoma City, are still in the Legislature.)

Mr. Lauinger, state chairman of Oklahomans for Life, has correctly described the procedure as "barbaric inhumanity." And in a letter to the editor published today in the Tulsa World, he laments that "ongoing Tulsa World coverage of an important Oklahoma abortion law continues to describe the relevant abortion method in stunningly euphemistic terms."

The Unborn-Child Protection-from-Dismemberment-Abortion Act deals with what happens to a baby; the World’s coverage pretends the baby does not exist.

The law, which has been the subject of recent court decisions, defines an abortion method used when the baby is between 12- and 24-weeks-old. Even among pro-abortion justices on the U.S. Supreme Court there has been grudging support for the logic of treating dismemberment abortion the same as partial-birth abortion, which the court prohibited in a landmark 2007 decision.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Gonzales case wrote that dismemberment abortion "could equally be characterized as 'brutal,' ... involving as it does 'tear(ing) (a fetus) apart' and 'ripp(ing) off' its limbs ..."

The World’s description of this abortion method? “…suction is used to remove the contents of the uterus, followed by the use of forceps and then more suction until the uterus is emptied.”

How might the World report if a woman 15-weeks pregnant were in a car that was hit by a drunk driver, and her baby were killed in the crash? “Contents of the uterus…”?

The Tulsa World’s motto, printed on its editorial page, ends with these words: “…publish and conceal not.” Having abandoned that principle in favor of trying to hide the reality about abortion, a more fitting adage would be, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

The Tulsa World's journalists will not see because they don't want to see. They resort to euphemisms to obfuscate ghastly realities. Curtis Killman reports that the law bans "a midterm pregnancy procedure." What the law (in its own words) bans is a dismemberment abortion, which means "purposely to dismember a living unborn child and extract him or her one piece at a time from the uterus through use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush, and/or grasp a portion of the unborn child's body to cut or rip it off."

Or what the Tulsa World calls a "procedure" involving "contents of the uterus." Is it any wonder voters don't trust the media?