{"id":33379,"date":"2025-02-03T23:58:07","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T23:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/?p=33379"},"modified":"2025-02-03T23:58:07","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T23:58:07","slug":"sooner-or-later-babies-will-be-too-precious-to-abort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/sooner-or-later-babies-will-be-too-precious-to-abort\/","title":{"rendered":"Sooner or later, babies will be too precious to abort"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By: Michael Cook, originally published January 31, 2025, Mercator<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In November last year French TV channel CNews\u00a0was fined \u20ac100,000<\/a>\u00a0(US$103,000) for stating that abortion is the leading cause of death worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fine was imposed by the\u00a0French media regulatory body Arcom<\/a>\u00a0after a CNews journalist made a reprehensible assertion on in February 2024 on its program “En qu\u00eate d’esprit” (\u201cIn Search of Spirit\u201d). In a discussion amongst several women about the psychological consequences of abortion, presenter Aymeric Pourbaix said that abortion was killing babies. All hell broke loose amongst the\u00a0bien-pensants<\/em>\u00a0of the Twitterverse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, that’s not exactly what Pourbaix said. He simply displayed an infographic based on Worldometer, which had drawn its figures from World Health Organization statistics. These showed that abortions account for 73 million deaths globally each year, compared to 10 million from cancer, and 6.2 million from smoking.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The infographic appeared for about 15 seconds. But they were 15 seconds of hellish torment for the\u00a0bien-pensants<\/em>. The response to the program was visceral \u2013 \u201cnauseating and deeply offensive\u201d, \u201csimply unacceptable\u201d, CNews should be nuked, and so on. It was denounced in the National Assembly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Arcom\u2019s ruling, CNews failed in its \u201cobligation of honesty and rigour in the presentation and processing of information.\u201d Abortion could not be described as a cause of death, since that would imply that abortion was murder. To assert that a foetus was a person is \u201cmanifestly inaccurate\u201d. CNews was peddling misinformation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

CNews is a Catholic channel owned by Catholic billionaire Vincent Bollor\u00e9. It was forced to issue a grovelling apology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But who is the real misinformation villain? Jean-Marie Le M\u00e9n\u00e9, president of the pro-life group, Fondation J\u00e9r\u00f4me Lejeune,\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0Arcom\u2019s ruling as Orwellian nonsense:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIndeed, equating an aborted child to a death would make abortion murder. To make it possible to practice it with a clear conscience, it is therefore forbidden to say that abortion takes a life. Otherwise the keystone of the system collapses. Abortion must remain harmless. But who believes in this fiction?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further, wrote Le M\u00e9n\u00e9, the decision amounts to censorship: \u201cTransforming a verified fact into a disputed opinion, susceptible to repression, leads to a consequence: omert\u00e1<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, so that Mercator<\/em> won\u2019t be fined in France, let\u2019s describe abortion as the \u201ccessation of a potential human life\u201d. That\u2019s OK, isn\u2019t it? How else can<\/em> you describe it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The best available statistics from the World Health Organization show that abortion is far and away the biggest cessator of human life, whether or not it is legal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest year for which data is reasonably complete is 2021. That year there were about\u00a068 million deaths in the world<\/a>, according to WHO. The leading causes of mortality were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n