We certainly wouldn’t want to force Politico writers to do things that undermine their principles.
We certainly wouldn’t want to force Politico writers to do things that undermine their principles.
P olitico reports that the Department of Health and Human Services is getting ready to scrap a Trump-era rule that would have protected the conscience rights of medical workers. At first, I was merely going to comment on the Biden administration’s pending attack on doctors uninterested in aborting babies or mutilating children, but after reading this piece by Alice Miranda Ollstein and Adam Cancryn, it seems worth noting the rank dishonesty that’s embedded in most of the coverage of this topic.
Politico refers euphemistically to abortion as “reproductive rights,” but calls a policy that protects workers from being compelled to participate in procedures they find immoral the “so-called conscience rule.” The term “so-called” intimates that the rule in question isn’t really about the thing its proponents claim it to be. It’s how a conservative pundit might refer to the so-called voting-rights bills or so-called infrastructure bills or so-called stimulus spending. “So-called” is never a neutral term and most often insinuates that the stated cause is a dishonest one.
Take it for a spin and see: “The so-called magazine Politico ran a piece by some so-called journalists about so-called abortion rights.”
The more traditional way to suggest that a policy position is merely a pretext for nefarious activism is to put quotation marks around the word, like so: “Last year,” Politico also notes, “Biden moved to undo anti-abortion restrictions on the Title X family planning program and foreign aid, and many groups have pushed for the ‘conscience’ rule to be next.” Placing completely legitimate ideas such as “religious liberty” within quotations is a widely used editorial device when writing stories about the state compelling some faithful Christian business owner to participate in a gay wedding or forcing nuns to chip in for condoms.
That said, the conscience rule is literally about the thing it professes to deal with, whether you believe it’s needed or not. And because we can’t divine the intentions of people or look into the souls of others, laws and rights are applied equally. Then again, anyone who refuses to end a life, whatever their reasons, is doing the moral thing.
Certainly, similar journalistic standards do not exist for the slew of euphemisms and misleading terms that exist in our political vernacular. No self-respecting mainstream reporter would ever place quotation marks around “environmentalist” or “social safety net.” It is used exclusively to explain “controversial” bills and rules that conservatives support. Though these days, reporters might also simply ignore the given name of a bill altogether and adopt the intentionally misleading moniker assigned to it by Democrats, as they did with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
As for the story itself, Politico quotes three pro-abortion advocates, not counting the spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, but apparently neither reporter could locate a single advocate for so-called conscience rules anywhere in the United States. Jacqueline Ayers, the senior vice president at Planned Parenthood, makes the utterly ridiculous contention that those who refuse to perform abortions “strip people of their sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms.” Abortion is not only a concocted constitutional right, it’s now also a concocted positive right. The notion that compelling medical employees, many of whom work for government-funded systems, to kill fetuses or engage in “gender-affirming care” is the same as taking someone else’s right away is twisting the understanding of so-called “freedom.”
Conscience rights, by the way, are nothing new. The “Trump-era” rule was also instituted by the Bush administration in 2008, before Obama scrapped it and started trying to make Little Sisters of the Poor buy abortifacients. Politico — and I should note that this goes on in most corporate media outlets — frames the decision as a reaction to recent GOP-led efforts to limit abortions and “transgender care,” which by reporters mean limiting puberty blockers for children. If you want to know how radical the Democratic Party has gotten, remember that Biden supports the so-called “Equality Act,” which would not only have forced taxpayers to fund abortions but treated doctors who refused to perform abortions or gender-reassignment surgeries as having broken civil-rights laws.
To comprehend the reality of this issue, one wishes that Politico reporters would write in clear-cut, honest language. Then again, we certainly wouldn’t want to force them to do things that undermine their principles.