There is someone obviously grotesque about making a pro-life statement by shooting three people dead, as a gunman appears to have done at a Colorado abortion clinic. The policeman he shot was a family man, with two children, a former iceskating champion.
The clinic is run by Planned Parenthood Federation; it says it has no idea whether it was deliberately targeted for its provision of abortion services, but it would be very odd if it were a purely random attack. But there’s a context for all this. A few months ago, pro-life activists released footage of the way PPF harvests aborted foetuses for their body parts which were then sold. The videos, I gather, are gruesome; it’s difficult to look at them and to avoid the very patent humanity of those foetuses. I didn’t watch them, though they’re online, for the same reason I don’t watch Islamic State decapitation videos, but I understand the callousness of the PPF people involved was quite something.
There was a great deal of fuss about all this in the US Congress from anti-abortion representatives. It has been extensively covered in the US media (see here, here, here, here and here). The New York Times even ran an editorial denouncing “the campaign of deception” against the PPF. But as you’d expect, next to nothing in the UK except in the Daily Telegraph. The controversy over those videos are, undeniably relevant to these shootings. Yet, I’ve been listening for over two hours to the Radio 4 Today programme, which covered the story, and there was nothing, but nothing, about all this in the description given of PPF, merely as a ‘family planning service’.
The news bulletins observed that PPF was ‘controversial’ and had been criticised in Congress, but there was nothing whatever about the grounds for that criticism and that controversy. In spite of it having been extensively covered. Is this because this would be an error of taste in the circumstances? Or is it because of something else?
Obviously pro-life extremists (whose prolifery doesn’t appear to cover life after birth) have been targeting abortion clinics before these videos. But entirely to ignore them seems more like self-censorship than balanced reporting.
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