Classic gratuitous criticism by the media

Here is why I sometimes seethe with anger over media irresponsibility. Even in my limited experience with the pro life movement, I am aware of any number of services provided to women in crisis pregnancies and to vulnerable women who need support to keep their babies.

Yet we find the following absolutely baseless remarks from a Toronto Star columnist discussing the U.S. legislation regarding unborn babies as victims of crime:

Last week, an unscientific poll on the Star's website asked if a 7-month-old fetus should have legal rights. The reaction was almost evenly divided. Fifty per cent said yes, 49 per cent said no.

In the U.S., this debate was more or less settled in April 2004, when President George W. Bush signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. It's also known as Laci and Conner's Law, for the pregnant Laci Peterson who was murdered by her husband in a case that dragged across cable news networks for months.

That law makes it a crime to harm a fetus during an assault on a pregnant woman. It gives a "child in utero" status as a legal victim, if he or she is injured or killed – intentionally or not – during a crime of violence. But the law explicitly excludes the prosecution of any provider of consensual abortion, those attempting to treat a pregnant woman, and the woman herself.

Needless to say, the debate leading up to the passage of the law was an ugly one.

On one side, those who profess to be pro-life – always there to protest a woman's choice but never around when hundreds of babies are born every year to poor or homeless women. On the other, those who defend a woman's right to control her own body but who have mixed feelings because, as the data show, an unusual number of women are violently killed while pregnant (see Antonia Zerbisias, 'Killings reopen debate on rights of fetuses,' The Star, October 10, 2007).

Ms Zerbisias has clearly not done the research necessary or she would never have written such silly accusations (highlighted in bold print). How can a person just say these things with no concern for accuracy? Are there no minimal reporting standards at the Toronto Star?

Do you see why I accuse the pro-choice movement of sacrificing information for ideology? As a long-time professor who marked hundreds of student papers, I give Ms Zerbisias an F for her unresearched and wholly arbitrary premise concerning the pro-life movement. As a 35-year practitioner and consultant in market research, I turn her article back as incomplete and lacking scientific methodology.

And as someone who who really does believe that women can make good choices if they have all of the information necessary, I see her as anti-woman and anti-choice. Clearly she doesn't trust women with all of the truth.