Biased, Pro-Abortion Media Focuses on a Dark Cloud Amid Rays of Light

The media is obviously biased, especially on the topic of abortion politics. Take this story at Reuters for example. It’s titled “Infant mortality rises in states with abortion bans, study finds.” Here’s how it opens:

Increases in infant mortality have been found in U.S. states that enacted abortion bans or severe restrictions after the Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling that guaranteed a right to the procedure, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

Across the 14 states where abortions were banned or prohibited after 6 weeks of pregnancy by laws that took effect between September 2021 and August 2022, there have been an estimated 478 infant deaths that would not have occurred if the restrictions were not in place, the researchers said.

“Restrictive abortion policies may be reversing decades of progress in reducing infant deaths in the U.S.,” study co-leader Alison Gemmill of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a statement.

Higher infant mortality is genuinely bad news and other outlets are reporting on this new research. Here’s a bit of CNN’s story.

Experts have long cautioned about the dangers of abortion bans, warning that restricting access to abortion can have significant negative effects on the health and livelihood of the individual and their families.

“I think back to the Dobbs case, where part of Mississippi’s argument to the Supreme Court was that there’s no societal reliance on abortion, that you can essentially take this right away and it’s not going to affect measurable outcomes. Well, here’s one, right?” said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College. She was not involved in the new studies but has researched abortion trends and policy impacts. “We see so clearly that when you take abortion access away, it increases infant mortality.”

Similarly, the NY Times has a story up about this which goes over all the same ground. Unlike the others, they did actually give space to a pro-life doctor who pointed out that no one lamenting the increase in infant mortality actually cares about the infants in question.

“All of these ‘excess’ children who were born would have been killed in induced abortions,” said Dr. Donna Harrison, who is director of research at American Association of Pro-Life Obstetrician and Gynecologists. “This means that anyone lamenting the results of this study isn’t really concerned that these babies died; rather, they wish they would have been killed earlier: in the womb.”

But that’s not even the whole story here. The real bias at work is in what these stories downplay. If you read to the final 3 paragraphs of the Reuters story linked above, or the final paragraphs of the NY Times story, you find out that there were actually two different papers published on this topic by the same group of researchers. One was about the increase in infant mortality and the other was about the increase in births in states that restrict abortions.

The analysis of birth data found that in the states with abortion bans, the rate of births per 1,000 women of reproductive age increased by 1.7 percent more than would be expected from previous years’ data.

“It might seem like a 1.7 percent change in the fertility rate isn’t a big deal, but it’s actually a very big deal,” Dr. Gemmill said. She said that demographers considered such an increase very significant and noted that it was higher than the 1.4 percent increase in birthrates related to the Covid pandemic.

In states with abortion bans, that increase translated to 22,180 more births than expected, the researchers said.

Twenty-two thousand one hundred eighty births! That’s a basketball stadium full of infants that weren’t aborted thanks to the Dobbs decision and pro-life laws in states like Texas. The fact that this is relegated to a minor side story while the 478 additional deaths are given top billing tells you a lot about the media. If just shy of 500 infants deaths is bad news (and it is) shouldn’t 22,180 additional births be seen as good news? Why is that not the lead story here? 

Well, I think you already know why. Because it’s likely that none of these outlets employs a single journalist who is pro-life and none of the people they do employ would ever credit the Dobbs decision for anything good. That would be very, very contrary to the narrative on this issue. So all they can do here is focus on the bad news because, while clearly not as significant as the good news, that at least does fit the narrative, i.e. pro-life laws are bad.

To be clear, the increase in infant mortality really is bad news and the states should make every effort to bring that number down as far as humanly possible. But the 22,180 births are great news and deserve to be reported as such instead of being downplayed for purely partisan reasons.