Back in June, I wrote about how the push was on from liberal abortion activists and left-wing media outlets to characterize an unborn child’s heartbeat as something other than what it was in order to fool people into thinking the child’s heart wasn’t actually beating. There was also a concerted effort to get journalists to stop referring to unborn children as children.
To recap, here are two examples of activism in and outside of the media on the terminology issue:
Dear Press, stop calling them “heartbeat” bills and call them “fetal pole cardiac activity” bills https://t.co/PVDTr6pLd0
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) May 15, 2019
CNN's Alisyn Camerota refers to unborn as "children" before catching herself and calling it a fetus during combative interview with Indiana Attorney General pic.twitter.com/2U6HDuNpDa
— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) May 29, 2019
Around that same time frame, the New York Times got involved in the campaign as well, describing a fetal heartbeat as “embryonic pulsing”:
The New York Times is dehumanizing unborn babies by calling the baby's heartbeat "embryonic pulsing."
Hey @nytimes here is the heartbeat of a 7-week-old unborn baby. There is no denying the baby's humanity!
Report the truth!https://t.co/JFbB86pr3qpic.twitter.com/hte1GUY2VF
— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) May 31, 2019
The Washington Post did their part as well:
WaPost: Embryonic heartbeats really just ‘the electric pulsing of what will become a fetus’s heart’ https://t.co/toPuStnF9Q
— LifeSiteNews.com (@LifeSite) June 1, 2019
Sadly, the Times is at it again. Their latest term? “The pulsing of what becomes the fetus’s heart” – identical to the term the Washington Post used in their reporting back in late May/early June:
Here’s the @nytimes referring to a fetal heartbeat as “the pulsing of what becomes the fetus’s heart,” but at least they managed to upgrade from “embryonic pulsing,” which is what they used in their reporting earlier this year. pic.twitter.com/eD9NpeN4gz
— Alexandra DeSanctis (@xan_desanctis) November 18, 2019
The irony of it all is that not even Planned Parenthood denies there is a fetal heartbeat at that early stage in pregnancy:
The new pro-choice talking point is that embryos & young fetal humans don’t actually have “heartbeats,” they just have “cardiac activity” or “embryonic pulsing.”
This is directly from Planned Parenthood themselves: https://t.co/qRfcj2rkJj pic.twitter.com/j3mqqcl4Ue
— herb (@HerbGeraghty) June 6, 2019
In spite of that, as I’ve said before the pro-abortion left, including their mainstream media allies, realizes that the most surefire way to keeping people believing in the “right to choose” is by dehumanizing unborn life by way of using vague or clinical terms. Like in their use of “fetus” instead of “child” or “baby.” Like in the way they’ve (falsely) asserted that there is no such thing as a “late term” or “partial birth” abortion.
Democrats and their feminist supporters have been very effective over the years at shifting the debate over abortion from being about the unborn baby and instead to being about the “woman’s right to choose.” They’ve been successful in this endeavor because liberal mainstream media news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN willingly and eagerly go along with them.
But don’t you dare accuse them of picking sides or anything.
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— Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 16+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter. –
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