Topic: NewsBusters
An April 18 NewsBusters post by Ken Shepherd bashed CBS for using the phrase "what the law calls a partial birth abortion" to describe the procedure banned in a law the Supreme Court upheld, even though it's "c umbersome," because "[b]oth 'late term abortion' and 'partial birth abortion' are now phrases that signify a position." Shepherd claimed that "'partial-birth abortion' is not political invective, it's descriptive layman's language to describe a medical procedure," comparing it to "heart attack" as "the layman's term for the medically-correct term 'myocardial infarction.' "
In fact, the phrase "partial-birth abortion" is political invective. Shepherd doesn't acknowledge the fact that the term was coined and used in the mid-1990s by opponents of the procedure -- that is, Republicans and conservatives. Pretending that it's not a political term doesn't make it so, especially since Sheppard seems to express such glee that it "vividly describes" the procedure at hand.
UPDATE: Indeed, Shepherd seems to revel in those descriptions, and he's offended when they're not vivid enough. In an April 19 post, he writes that some newspapers "included descriptions of the gruesome abortion procedure, although none described the suctioning of the unborn child's brain from the skull as the manner of ending the fetus's life, and the NY Times failed to mention the brain suction at all."
Shepherd's attitude comports with that of the MRC's, which is that only liberals have an agenda on abortion.
