An Atlantic article about the pro-abortion extremist group Jane’s Revenge highlights the media’s hypocrisy.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we explore the mainstream media’s pro-abortion obsession and attacks against the Right, and hit more media misses.
Fearmongering over Roe’s Reversal Shows No Signs of Slowing
It has been nearly two months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and despite the assertions of many liberals, the sky is not falling.
However, many liberals and the mainstream media remain in a state of breathless panic in covering abortion and the Right.
Several mainstream media outlets latched onto a story about the arrest of a mother and daughter in Nebraska. The mother was arrested for giving her daughter a chemical-abortion pill after the prescribed gestation limit, and the daughter was arrested for allegedly trying to burn and then bury the aborted child.
Forbes reported that “Facebook Gave Nebraska Cops A Teen’s DMs So They Could Prosecute Her For Having An Abortion.” NBC explained that “Facebook turned over chat messages between mother and daughter now charged over abortion.” The Daily Beast claimed that “Facebook Turned Over Messages in Disturbing Abortion Case Against Teen and Mom.” More than a half-dozen other outlets framed the story similarly.
Yet the headlines are deceiving; the 17-year-old teen faces no criminal charges for taking the abortion pills at 23 weeks pregnant — an age at which 25 percent of prematurely born children will survive outside the womb — despite Nebraska law’s prohibiting abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation. This is because no pro-life state laws punish a mother who receives an abortion.
Celeste Burgess is accused of “removing, concealing or abandoning” a dead body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting. After the pills caused the death of her unborn child, Burgess and her mother tried first to burn and then to bury the remains. She and her mother initially told investigators that she had miscarried.
Facebook was served with a search warrant by detectives who discovered messages of the two women discussing their intention to get the “thing” out of Burgess and burn the evidence afterward.
Only the mother, Jessica Burgess, faces charges for administering the chemical-abortion pills to her daughter, Celeste Burgess, without a medical license and beyond the 20-week limit. Medication abortion taken after ten weeks of pregnancy greatly increases the risk of complications and oftentimes necessitates further medical care.
The alleged crimes all occurred before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Yet despite the media’s attempts to latch on to any abortion-related story that furthers their push to demonize pro-lifers, a writer for the Atlantic claimed in a recent article that it is the Right who has a “new bogeyman” in the abortion debate.
The article describes Jane’s Revenge as a “mysterious pro-abortion-rights group” that is “claiming credit for acts of vandalism around the country, and right-wing activists and politicians are eating it up.”
Staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany suggests that Jane’s Revenge’s “practical significance remains in question” and asks “Just how meaningful is Jane’s Revenge?”
The group announced an “open season” on pro-life crisis-pregnancy centers in the spring and has taken responsibility for several attacks.
It notes that the group has “taken credit for incidents of vandalism and property destruction in 16 cities throughout the U.S., among them the firebombings of a pro-life medical office in Buffalo, New York, and the offices of a Christian-fundamentalist lobbying group in Madison, Wisconsin.”
The article notes that, when reporting on Jane’s Revenge, conservative news sources tend to cite a Family Research Council list of more than 100 attacks on churches, pro-life organizations, property, and people since the Dobbs opinion draft leak in May. The article seems to try to discredit this threat by noting that eleven of the more than 100 attacks “have no obvious ties to Jane’s Revenge or the Dobbs decision.”
The article confusingly acknowledges that “pro-abortion-rights activists have engaged in vandalism in recent weeks, and the blog posts associated with Jane’s Revenge are actively encouraging the behavior,” but then underplays the political violence by saying, “But that does not imply the existence of a complex, coordinated campaign of violence.” The article conveniently fails to mention that many terror groups throughout history have managed to inflict terrible violence while operating in a decentralized manner.
And while Jane’s Revenge failed to intimidate Supreme Court Justices out of overturning Roe, their terror campaign is making an impact: As NR’s Caroline Downey reported earlier this month, a pro-life pregnancy center in Buffalo, N.Y. has finally reopened 52 days after being firebombed by Jane’s Revenge, but it’s doing so in a weakened financial condition after spending $100,000 on new security measures.
And it appears the perception of Jane’s Revenge as a “bogeyman” isn’t confined to right-wing media: White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said that President Joe Biden “denounces” the group’s activities, and Facebook has added the group to its list of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations.”
And while the Atlantic is busy excusing violence toward pro-lifers, MSNBC published an opinion essay claiming that “the end of Roe could enable a horrifying neo-Nazi plot.”
The column reads: “Abortion is seen by white extremists as part of the so-called white genocide plot, and in that sense, reproductive rights are a part of their ‘white extinction anxiety.’ The loss of Roe v. Wade, in this scenario, directly serves white supremacist extremist goals — as long as it is white babies who cannot be aborted.”
It goes on to describe the “especially chilling” state of reproductive rights in the U.S. post-Roe.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade referred to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describing an insufficient “domestic supply of infants” to meet the demand for infant adoption in the U.S.
He also cited Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s December reflection during oral arguments that forced pregnancy is not a ‘meaningful hardship’ because unwanted babies can be surrendered through ‘safe haven’ laws. These kinds of justifications for dismantling reproductive rights reduce women to vessels charged with producing babies for the good of the collective.
The piece concludes, “In a post-Roe world, a plot to force women to become pregnant, however fringe it might be, takes on a whole new meaning.”
However, as pro-lifers have noted time and time again, abortion restrictions do not cause forced births. The forced-birth argument ignores the fact that, except for cases of rape, women are not forced to have sex and become pregnant in the first place.
But sure, it is conservatives who have concocted a bogeyman.
Headline Fail of the Week
When the Atlantic wasn’t focused on poking fun at pro-lifers for worrying about violent pro-abortion extremists, the magazine was warning that the rosary has become a weapon: “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary.”
“Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or ‘rad trad’) Catholics,” the piece reads. “On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal. Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (‘God wills it’) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants.”
NR’s Dan McLaughlin said it best: “Somebody ought to tell Atlantic readers that firebombings and assassination attempts are worse than the Rosary. It does not seem that the editors of the magazine have the heart to be the ones to do it.”
Media Misses
• The New York Times declined to disclose its owners’ cozy relationship with Dan Goldman, a candidate for the Democratic nomination in New York’s 10th congressional district, in its endorsement of Goldman, points out Ryan Grim of the Intercept. Several Sulzbergers, who have owned the Times since 1896, attended an elite private school near Washington, D.C., that Goldman and Cathy Sulzberger served on the board of trustees of. Cathy Sulzberger’s husband also contributed to Goldman’s campaign for New York attorney general last year.
The New York Times, in its endorsement of Danny Goldman this weekend, somehow neglected to mention that he’s a family friend of the Sulzbergers. /1 pic.twitter.com/KWSx14i9LW
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) August 15, 2022
• Morning Joe enlisted disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok to vouch for the bureau’s integrity on Monday morning. Strzok famously was found to have acted improperly when he assured his mistress and colleague, Lisa Page, that they would “stop” Donald Trump from becoming president. Strzok played key roles in the investigations into both Trump’s ties to the Russian government and Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information as secretary of state. Strzok is engaged in an active wrongful-termination lawsuit against the bureau, which removed him from the payroll in 2018 for his various infractions.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe brings on @PeterStrzok to argue on behalf of the FBI’s integrity: “It’s not that the FBI is targeting any one side or the other. What you see is the FBI going out on a day-in and day-out basis objectively investigating allegations of law.” pic.twitter.com/bIyBladBMg
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 15, 2022