US National Public Radio has just issued a mandatory censorship protocol for reporters.

They are no longer allowed to use the word ‘pro-life’ to those campaigning for the right to life of unborn children. They have to call them ‘abortion rights opponents’.

In describing those who support abortion, reporters have been forbidden to use the phrase ‘pro-abortion.’ They may, naturally, describe those who oppose abortion as ‘anti-abortion’.

Similar thought-control policies have been adopted by major US news corporations Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, CBS and NBC.

Dictats on what words reporters are allowed to use? Prescribed words? Forbidden words? Sound familiar?

This kind of ideological censorship was chillingly diagnosed by George Orwell in his final novel, 1984. The totalitarian society seeks to suppress and eventually eliminate dissent from the officially desired thoughts by gradually imposing a new obligatory official language called Newspeak so that dissenting opinion, not only cannot be articulated in a publicly approved way, but, in the end, cannot even be thought privately.

As Orwell put it, the purpose was not only to provide a medium of expression for the ‘proper’ worldview and mental habits, ‘but to make all other modes of thought impossible’ – it was intended that when Newspeak.had been adopted for once and for all, an unorthodox thought ‘should be literally unthinkable.’ This was done, he says, ‘chiefly by the eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings.’ The imposed words, Orwell says, ‘had been deliberately constructed for political purposes’, that is, they ‘were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.’

What a terrible irony – major news organizations in the free world are imposing Newspeak on their reporters.

Now we have major news outlets in the free world succumbing to the ideology of abortion rights which renders the unborn child what in Orwellian Newspeak presciently calls an ‘unperson.’

In Nazi Germany, gleichschaltung was the process by which one institution after another conformed to the totalitarian ideology in power, sometimes without even having to be compelled - they just saw the way the wind was blowing and got in line voluntarily.

The fact that major news institutions in the US are engaging in a self-imposed pro-abortion gleichschaltung is hard not to read it as a move of desperation on the part of the pro-abortion ideological elite.

They sense public opinion gradually shifting from majority pro-abortion to majority pro-life. They see this reflected in polls showing a majority in the US for the first time in recent years describing itself as pro-life rather than pro-abortion.

They see one movie after another exploring unexpected pregnancies in a positive light and showing ways forward, movies like Waitress, Knocked Up, Juno, Precious and Leonera, and on the other hand, the even more radical emergence of movies showing the dark side of abortion, movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.

They see women who’ve been through abortion coming forward together asking for their experience to be heard and heeded.

They’re losing the debate, so they’re changing tack. ‘If we can’t win the debate, let’s not have the debate, let’s suppress it’, they seem to be saying.

If news outlets opt to turn themselves into a pro-abortion echo-chamber – talking to one another in a fake language designed to pretend that abortion is not destroying a human life - they will lose half the public.

With the click of a mouse, the days of this kind of censorship are well and truly numbered.

Abortion in Ireland

Marie Stopes – yet another misleading abortion poll

Source: Pro Life Campaign

When it waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Abortion-provider Marie Stopes’ YouGov poll on abortion, released earlier this week, scored high on quackery.

If you ask a loaded question, you get a loaded and so worthless answer. Loaded with what? Loaded with false presuppositions that are never spelt out to the respondent.

The latest Marie Stopes poll claims three quarters of the Irish public support abortion in certain circumstances. The poll makes no distinction between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion, where the life of the unborn baby is directly targeted.

When a poll asks misleading questions, the answers measure how far the questioner has misled the respondents. If your question implies that women’s lives and health are at risk because abortion is not available, then you are inviting the answer, ‘Of course, abortion should be available to save those women’s lives.’ But that’s a loaded question. It is loaded with a false presupposition.

The truth is that Ireland is the safest country on planet earth for a woman having a baby. We have the best, the best, maternal safety for the lives of mothers having babies in the world.

Opinion polls are supposed to be snapshots of public opinion not tools of ideological propaganda. When the public are asked straightforward not misleading questions on abortion the answer is overwhelmingly pro-life. In a 2009 IMS/Millward Brown poll commissioned by the Pro-Life Campaign, 63% of the public supported a prohibition on abortion while ensuring the continuation of existing practice of intervention to save a mother’s life. Only 16% said they were opposed to such a prohibition on abortion.

The pro-life community needs to understand what Marie Stopes and similar abortion advocacy groups are working at. The possibility that their polls may be misleading doesn’t seem to bother them. The fact that a sizable chunk of the media is prepared to run with their polls without asking tough questions about them makes it easier for them to create a public expectation around the idea that abortion legislation is inevitable. This highlights the necessity for groups like the Pro-Life Campaign to avail of every opportunity to set the record straight with the public.