Gary Legum of Salon.com wrote on Thursday the “antiabortionists” are upset with “perky newswoman” Katie Couric at Yahoo! because “she has dared to take her cameras inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, which looks like a fairly normal medical center and not the blood-soaked abattoir of dismembered baby limbs that conservatives just know it to be in their tiny blackened hearts.”
After accusing the people who actually don’t want to dismember children of having “blackened hearts,” Legum launched predictable attacks at the “Orwellian-named” Center for Medical Progress.
[Couric’s] four minutes of video made antiabortionists angry, presumably because none of it was dubiously-sourced stock footage that claimed to have been shot inside a PP clinic but was actually from somewhere else….Here is a nice, clean medical facility stocked with what looks like top-notch medical equipment, trained nurses and gynecologists on site, and anything else necessary to ensure that the women who come there seeking an abortion can have it performed safely and discreetly. All without without being shamed or judged, since the psychological health of women making a difficult decision is as important as their physical health.
Legum apparently never considered the possibility that Couric’s blatantly promotional footage shows a “nice, clean medical facility,” rather than a “blood-soaked abattoir of dismembered baby limbs,” because the pro-abortion lobby is a fan of Couric’s work and Planned Parenthood would not include the pile of discarded children in the free tour.
Despite his admiration for the building, Legum could not help but complain about the message the bulletproof windows and metal detector sent to the teens.
It’s great that some poor 17-year-old girl who needs treatment for an STD should have to go behind bulletproof glass and through a metal detector before being treated for gonorrhea. That is definitely a healthy message that in no way implies sexual activity is shameful that we should want to send to teenagers.
At Salon, you feel the pain of an 17-year-old with an STD, and never dare to wonder if a parent might have wanted to keep their child from engaging in unhealthy and immoral behavior.
Finally, Legum uses the opportunity to complain about the Texas pro-life law HB2.
Watching this, I couldn’t help but think back to some of the justifications I read about HB2, [which] mandated...that abortion facilities follow the same standards as Ambulatory Surgical Centers, an expensive and unnecessary upgrade for clinics that already often operate on tight budgets….[D]efenders of HB2...said...they were oh so concerned with women’s health, with making sure that women who underwent abortions were doing so in the safest and cleanest of facilities. The bill would protect women from the bloodthirsty butchers of the abortion industry. Anyone with half a brain in her head knew this was garbage. Abortion is actually a safer procedure than childbirth for mothers, with a mortality rate of .6 per 100,000 compared to 8.8 per 100,000 for live births. Facts are so inconvenient.
So not only does Legum believe legal campaigns to upgrade the safety of abortion clinics are conspiratorial attacks on the abortion industry, he sites a study claiming that there is more death from live births than from abortions.
What he doesn’t tell his readers is that this study has been criticized for failing to “cite, much less discuss, the large record linkage studies which contradict [its] conclusions.” He obviously ignored the “safety” of the child aborted.
In the end this is typical Salon journalism; defend the abortion lobby by disparaging pro-lifers and use faulty studies to prove the “safety” of abortion.
