PBS and Abortion/Abortionists

 

PBS to air “After Tiller” documentary that glorifies third-trimester abortion “providers”

By Dave Andrusko
National Right to Life News Today has posted a flock of stories about “After Tiller,” an unabashed love story, so to speak, about the successors to a man who specialized in late, late abortions.

I assumed Martha Shane’s and Lana Wilson’s tribute to Warren Hern, Shelley Sella, LeRoy Carhart, and Susan Robinson (the four abortionists “openly performing third-trimester abortions”) would show up at places like the Sundance Film Festival and a few obscure film festivals and then sink into the anonymity it so richly deserves.

Not so. PBS tells us that come September 1, “After Tiller” will have “its national broadcast premiere … as part of the 27th season of POV (Point of View).” POV is, we are informed, “American television’s longest-running independent documentary series and the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.”
True, you would have to be very creative to make noble martyrs out of Hern, Sella, Carhart, and Robinson.

Needless to say, the press release announcing this in-kind contribution to abortions that make even some harden pro-abortionists blanche is bathed in laudatory commentary about Hern, who was killed in 2009, and his successors.

But first, the obligatory everyone-must-see-this-film-regardless-of-perspective comment, in this case from Duane Byrge of The Hollywood Reporter: “Whether one is pro-life, pro-choice or without an opinion on the issue, ‘After Tiller’ provides personal insight into a heart-wrenching, complex reality.”
The PBS press release (your tax dollars at work) quotes Shane and Wilson in a manner that allows them to come off not as partisans—which they clearly are—but seekers-after-truth.

“It was for this reason — and with a desire to shed more light, rather than more heat, on this issue — that we decided to go inside the lives of the last four doctors performing third-trimester abortions in America with ‘After Tiller.’ We discovered that they recognized the moral and ethical complexity of doing this work better than anyone. In fact, they struggle with the issues at the heart of this debate every day.”

Fortunately for the third-trimester abortion trade, their consciences are easily pinned to the canvas.
Just three points.
First, for whatever combination of reasons, every time Susan Robinson gives an interview, she undercuts the rationales and rationalizations that are presented as justifications to abort babies who have long since passed the point of viability. As we explained last October, the month before Robinson offered a bevy of extenuating circumstances—excuses—to get around the simple truth that she will abort some unspecified percentage of huge, mature babies for reasons most people would not believe are commensurate with the gravity of killing a viable unborn baby.
Then in early October we learned that Robinson did not know about the long list of parents ready to adopt children with Down syndrome and that “I think that the public perceives first of all that late abortion could be completely eliminated if people would only get their act together and have their abortions earlier, which is completely untrue.”
Second, the criteria for which babies she will abort is hazy, to put it mildly. As Caitriona Palmer, an ultra-sympathetic interviewer put it, “Many others who come to Robinson are carrying fetuses destined to be too ill or disabled to live productive lives outside of the womb.” By “productive lives,” you know Robinson is talking about babies with Down syndrome and babies with maladies that are not fatal.

And, of course, most people would be sickened to learn how these babies are killed–first poisoned with Digoxin and then torn apart, or poisoned and then delivered in-tact by induction, depending on the baby’s age—and that “some are having their second or third” abortion.

Third, what’s the margin of error in dating these babies’ ages? Read this:

“For pregnancies above 30 weeks Robinson relies on an ultrasound to check the age of the fetus but admits that this notoriously inaccurate method, combined with the often hazy conception dates provided by the women, can produce a window of error of plus or minus three weeks.

“’Let’s say the woman is at 31 weeks,’ Robinson says, ‘well, given the inaccuracy of the ultrasound she could perfectly be 34 weeks. How would I feel if that happened?’

“And it has happened.

“Robinson still recalls the shock she felt when she terminated the pregnancy of a fetus she thought was approximately 32 weeks. But when she saw the aborted body she realised that it was more like 37 weeks. She was devastated. ‘It was quite a moment,’ she remembers.”

“It was quite a moment.”

Indeed, it was “quite a moment.”

The initial round of comments to the press release posted at PBS.org were almost uniformly negative. No doubt the late-late abortion apologists will rally their supporters to flood the response line.
None of that will change the ugly truth. That the lives of huge babies who are way, way past the point of being able to feel pain, are being brutally snuffed out.

And that PBS is willing to give a platform to a film that glorifies the killing.
Tip of the hat to lifenews.com.

Source: NRLC News