http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2559186?utm_content=bufferaf20a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=bufferAnnual pro-life march again attracts huge crowd, little media attention
BY T. BECKET ADAMS | JANUARY 23, 2015 | 5:23 PM
Newsrooms everywhere focused Thursday on a tense legislative battle over a bill in the Republican-controlled House to ban late-term abortions, even as thousands of pro-life demonstrators gathered for the 42nd annual March for Life in the nation’s capital went largely unnoticed by the press.
There were exceptions to the narrowly focused coverage, most notably in the Washington Post and USA Today, which reported on both the march, which takes place every year on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, and the GOP House’s intra-party bickering.
But the lion’s share of abortion-related coverage Thursday focused on the GOP leadership's abrupt scuttling of the "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” Wednesday night over a revolt spearheaded by Reps. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., and Jackie Walorski, R-In., two of the bill’s sponsors.
The bill would have banned all abortions performed at 20 weeks of pregnancy or later, when the child is capable of feeling pain, except in certain cases, including “where the pregnancy is the result of rape, or the result of incest against a minor, if the rape has been reported at any time prior to the abortion to an appropriate law enforcement agency.”
The two congresswoman, both of whom supported the same bill just two years ago, were joined by a handful of like-minded House members who said they couldn’t support the proposed legislation due to its rape reporting requirement, explaining that it might damage the GOP’s image with “women and younger voters,” as the New York Times put it.
After House leaders agreed late Wednesday to shelve the bill ahead of the March for Life, they replaced it with one banning federal funding for abortion, which passed Thursday. The inevitable result of the unexpected House revolt was intense news coverage from a media that was otherwise disinterested in the March for Life except as a well-timed and dramatic backdrop to the legislative flap.
The New York Times, for example, reported Thursday that “House Republicans struggled … to mend another unwelcome rift that threatens to tarnish their party’s image.”
The Times’ coverage of the march itself consisted mostly of republishing an Associated Press wire story on the annual gathering.
Elsewhere, on the day of the march, the Chicago Tribune ran a headline reading: “GOP pushes abortion bill through House on March for Life Day.”
“House Republicans pass watered-down antiabortion bill,” the Washington Post added in its own report.
After House leadership pulled the bill, newsrooms immediately rushed to underscore the fact that female members of the GOP led the charge to have the bill shelved, with groups like MSNBC and National Journal focusing on the “woman kill bill” angle.
Rarely mentioned in many of the reports on House fight, however, was that most Americans support banning abortions at 20 weeks.
A survey conducted in 2014 by Quinnipiac found that when the House last addressed the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” 60 percent of respondents supported the measure, while only 33 percent said they opposed it.
Earlier, in 2013, a Washington Post/ABC survey found that 60 percent of respondents support limiting abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy. Women respondents in the same poll supported the limitations by 71 percent.
“One of the clearest messages from [polling] trends,” Gallup reported separately in May 2013, “is that Americans oppose late-term abortion.”
Still, even with what appears to be broad support for banning late-term abortions, newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, characterized the bill’s opponents as “moderates” and “centrists."
“Some female Republican and centrist lawmakers helped scuttle a vote on a controversial measure to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, prompting the House on Thursday to pass a separate, largely symbolic bill that would further restrict federal funding to pay for abortions,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday in an article titled “House Passes Bill Prohibiting Federal Funds Being Used for Abortions.”
The morning after the march, both the Washington Post and the Boston Globe featured stories on the GOP abortion fight on their front pages, the former with a headline that read, “Abortion debate reveals GOP rift,” and the latter with a side headline that read, “The House voted to bar federal funds for most abortion coverage.”
