Why, oh why, do I have to follow a stridently partisan news outlet in order to hear about this?
Abortionist who performed over 40,000 abortions becomes pro-life activist
It should have been a routine abortion in the early second trimester. The woman was having her ninth abortion, as former Serbian abortionist Stojan Adasevic describes in the documentary “The First Hour.”
Adasevic, who is now a pro-life leader in Serbia, had performed over 48,000 abortions before doubts about the procedure made him stop—other sources claim that number is closer to 60,000… liveactionnews.org/abortionist-performed-40000-abortions-becomes-pro-life-activist/
Do a google search. This man’s name (as of, like, 8:00 pm last night) shows up on literally no mainstream outlets. How can this fail to be news, unless it is an outright fabrication? And how can there be a national debate on this issue when events of this magnitude are suppressed? Another ex-abortionist Antonio Oriente never made it out of the anti-abortion news ghetto either. Bernard Nathanson (60,000 served) and Abby Johnson fared somewhat better. And if we are willing to mine deep into the ghetto (such as here and here), where the web design gets really crude and the reliability drops correspondingly, we find that there are many others besides. Outside the ghetto, firm and reliable abortion statistics—1.2 million annually in the US alone, 1 billion worldwide in the last 30 or so years—are kept quiet. (And I doubt these figures include the sizable mail-order abortion industry and the contested possibility that certain forms of contraception also work as abortifacients.)
This reminds me of Joseph Bottum's political epiphany:
This reminds me of Joseph Bottum's political epiphany:
So, one day around 1983, I’m sitting in the smoking lounge of the Georgetown University library— remember when college libraries still had smoking rooms?— reading Tom Jones (education is nice, our teachers had told us) while tendrils from my Marlboro (cigarettes are cool, the movies had shown us) spiraled up in blue-gray swirls to break and pool on the stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling. And, growing tired at last of young Tom’s long journey to reconcile with Squire Allworthy and the all-too-worthy Sophia, I let my eyes drift to the window. Down on the sidewalk, across the street, was a woman with a toddler in a baby stroller and a small black dog on a bright red leash. April is Washington’s best month, and the sun filtered in a glow through the leaves of the new-green trees as the overexcited, overhappy little dog bounced and yapped, weaving his tangled leash through the stroller’s wheels while the mother stumbled after him and the toddler laughed and laughed, clapping her small hands at the slap-stick world into which God and her parents had unexpectedly delivered her.
I wish that words could fully re-create that scene— the sharp blue of the stroller, the mother in her red jacket straining for the dog as her snarled purse spilled coins and baby wipes across the brick sidewalk— for it was at that moment I began to fail at the great American goal of niceness and coolness at which I had been aimed since grade school. And it all started with the sudden, absolute conviction that babies are good.
No thought exists in isolation. One conviction leads to another, too fast sometimes to follow, and I stood there remembering in a mad rush all the college girls I knew who had abortions. I stood there at the library window, on that green April day, remembering all my complicity in joining the great sexual revolution that was supposed to empower women but mostly ended up empowering college boys to enjoy free and apparently consequenceless sex. And I knew that, fun as the pleasure dome had been, I must leave— for it was kept bright and warm with the bodies of aborted babies, burned in the basement furnace for fuel. Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (pp. 156-158).
Clearly, there's a lot more at stake in the matter of abortion than campus hedonism and the relative merit of coolness. But the image of the furnace in the basement is entirely apt. Because when it comes to abortion, the press is strangely incapable of objectivity.
I found this out quite by accident a few years ago. Our good intention was always to get up early to go to the mass of our choice. But this seldom happened so we’d go to a later mass, or failing that, a yet later mass. One of the latests masses available in the area is offered at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C., which is where we headed this particular January evening.
Usually the Shrine is well visited, but this particular evening it was utterly packed. Nowhere to park. People everywhere. Entire swarms of young priests such as I had never seen. Think of one of the great cathedrals—Notre Dame, Cologne. The Shrine is even bigger, but unlike these older churches it also has a second level which of equal size. That evening it was practically impossible to move on either level. Every seat was taken and every patch of wall space was covered with the young and the old. Literally thousands—tens of thousands?—of people. I asked someone why. It was the vigil mass for the annual March for Life. And furthermore, I was told, it wouldn’t appear anywhere in the news. And it didn’t.
Of course the vigil mass is but a warm-up for the real event. The next year when I attended the march there were some 400,000 to 600,000 marchers, by far outstripping mall rallies by Jon Stewart and Glen Beck combined. It even came close to rivaling presidential inaugurations. But those only happen every four years, and the March for Life is annual. So it would seem that, collectively, more people show up on the mall to demonstrate against abortion than for any other (non-recreational) reason.
And what shows up in the Washington Post? Maybe a blip on the front page referring to the story in the regional Metro section, maybe not. And what’s in the Metro section? First, a picture—the same basic picture as every year—where the handful of abortion advocates that show up confront the marchers and assume angry postures, each side holding up their signs. The implicit message: a few people got together downtown yesterday to vent their feelings. And then there is mention of the merely “thousands” (they never dare a real estimate) who marched against abortion, and spots from interviews, not with the march’s leaders, but with the youngest and least able defenders of life there. The message: the March for Life is put together for young kids brainwashed by their pastors and schlepped onto busses. (What, as opposed to the MTV kids back at home? No brainwashing there!)
A couple years of witnessing this and I could no longer read the papers the same. Where’s the sense of journalistic obligation? Where else are there yawning gaps in coverage, and why are they there? In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky gives us a nice beginning at an answer when he observes that the media are dominated by no more than nine (!) corporate conglomerates. Alas it's a book I've only skimmed. But I think it's safe to go further and assume that almost all the journalists and editors contributing to these media outlets had roughly identical educations—they are, to adopt the parlance of psychologists and anthropologists, W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Where "Educated" means: prolongedly exposed to Enlightenment assumptions and little else besides.
All of which means that to gain a critical perspective on the way things are requires great effort in a direction generally discouraged, an omnivorous taste for scholarship and reporting, and prolonged meditation on what resistance means. But these are matters for another entry.
I found this out quite by accident a few years ago. Our good intention was always to get up early to go to the mass of our choice. But this seldom happened so we’d go to a later mass, or failing that, a yet later mass. One of the latests masses available in the area is offered at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C., which is where we headed this particular January evening.
Usually the Shrine is well visited, but this particular evening it was utterly packed. Nowhere to park. People everywhere. Entire swarms of young priests such as I had never seen. Think of one of the great cathedrals—Notre Dame, Cologne. The Shrine is even bigger, but unlike these older churches it also has a second level which of equal size. That evening it was practically impossible to move on either level. Every seat was taken and every patch of wall space was covered with the young and the old. Literally thousands—tens of thousands?—of people. I asked someone why. It was the vigil mass for the annual March for Life. And furthermore, I was told, it wouldn’t appear anywhere in the news. And it didn’t.
Of course the vigil mass is but a warm-up for the real event. The next year when I attended the march there were some 400,000 to 600,000 marchers, by far outstripping mall rallies by Jon Stewart and Glen Beck combined. It even came close to rivaling presidential inaugurations. But those only happen every four years, and the March for Life is annual. So it would seem that, collectively, more people show up on the mall to demonstrate against abortion than for any other (non-recreational) reason.
And what shows up in the Washington Post? Maybe a blip on the front page referring to the story in the regional Metro section, maybe not. And what’s in the Metro section? First, a picture—the same basic picture as every year—where the handful of abortion advocates that show up confront the marchers and assume angry postures, each side holding up their signs. The implicit message: a few people got together downtown yesterday to vent their feelings. And then there is mention of the merely “thousands” (they never dare a real estimate) who marched against abortion, and spots from interviews, not with the march’s leaders, but with the youngest and least able defenders of life there. The message: the March for Life is put together for young kids brainwashed by their pastors and schlepped onto busses. (What, as opposed to the MTV kids back at home? No brainwashing there!)
A couple years of witnessing this and I could no longer read the papers the same. Where’s the sense of journalistic obligation? Where else are there yawning gaps in coverage, and why are they there? In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky gives us a nice beginning at an answer when he observes that the media are dominated by no more than nine (!) corporate conglomerates. Alas it's a book I've only skimmed. But I think it's safe to go further and assume that almost all the journalists and editors contributing to these media outlets had roughly identical educations—they are, to adopt the parlance of psychologists and anthropologists, W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Where "Educated" means: prolongedly exposed to Enlightenment assumptions and little else besides.
All of which means that to gain a critical perspective on the way things are requires great effort in a direction generally discouraged, an omnivorous taste for scholarship and reporting, and prolonged meditation on what resistance means. But these are matters for another entry.