Category: Jill Stanek

Media Embargo Slowly Crumbling on Jennifer McKenna Morbelli’s Death

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Jennifer McKenna Morelli with her future husband in 2008

Jennifer Morbelli died last Thursday at Shady Grove Hospital in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. after undergoing a gruesome third-term abortion ordeal at Dr. LeRoy Carhart’s Germantown Reproductive Health clinic. A 29-year-old married kindergarten teacher in the affluent Westchester County suburbs of New York, Morbelli had actually named her unborn daughter Madison Leigh, but reportedly decided to seek an abortion in her 33rd week of pregnancy after prenatal testing diagnosed her baby as suffering from a disorder that causes seizures.

Both Morbelli and her daughter will be recognized at a funeral mass Wednesday — coincidentally, Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent — at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church in New Rochelle.

Carhart has been called “likely the most prominent abortionist in America.” Carhart has been the plaintiff in two cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and was featured in a highly-praised documentary, After Tiller, about an abortionist who was assassinated in 2009.

Given these facts, ask yourself a question: How could any news editor look at the death of Jennifer Morbelli and say, “That”s not a story”?

This is not merely news, it’s got enough of a human-interest angle to deserve at least a two-hour network special or a magazine cover story.

Forget your opinion about the legal and political controversies involved and think about the basic journalistic news value of this story. Here is a profound human tragedy, a young woman who died in a heartbreaking circumstance which just happens to be a microcosm of a major national issue, and . . . that’s not a story? Turn in your press credentials, clean out your desk and find yourself another line of work.

This was why, last Friday, I called attention to the complete news blackout on the story: Jennifer Morbelli died in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., and yet neither the Washington Post nor the Baltimore Sun deemed it newsworthy? The illogic was glaring, and the Washington Post finally did a 350-word article inside the Metro section of Sunday’s paper. The media embargo crumbled further yesterday when the Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y., reported on the death of the local kindergarten teacher. And now the Washington Post has followed up with coverage of Monday’s press conference by pro-life activists:

The Maryland Office of Health Care Quality is investigating the death of a woman who visited a controversial abortion clinic in Germantown before dying last week at a local hospital.
More than 150 demonstrators gathered near the clinic Monday to step up their efforts to draw national attention to the case, asserting that the clinic’s leader, LeRoy Carhart, was directly responsible for the woman’s death and that she had come to his office for a multi-day abortion procedure when she was 33 weeks pregnant.
“We will not rest until this clinic is shut down and the license of LeRoy Carhart is revoked. God let it be so,” the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, said at the demonstration.
The circumstances leading to the woman’s death remained unclear Monday. State and county officials confirmed that she had visited the abortion clinic and that she died Thursday morning at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, but they offered no details.
Antiabortion demonstrators seized upon the incident to try to sway public opinion about late-term procedures. Many of their specific claims about the case could not be immediately verified. . . .

You can read the whole thing, and I could criticize how the reporter, Dan Morse, handled the story, making “antiabortion demonstrators” (rather than LeRoy Carhart or Jennifer Morbelli) the central characters of the narrative and insinuating that their version of events was unreliable. (As I pointed out Monday night, “If it weren’t for pro-life activists who keep constant vigil at this facility, we might not even know about Jennifer Morbelli’s painful death.”) But I’m not criticizing Morse, at least not at length, because at this point I really don’t care how much pro-abortion spin or liberal bias goes into mainstream media coverage of the story, just so long as they actually cover the story.

In the same spirit, therefore, let us applaud Roseann Moring and Robby Korth of the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald for their coverage:

A New York woman’s death has put Bellevue abortion provider LeRoy Carhart back in the national spotlight.
Abortion opponents say a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher died Thursday after getting a late-term abortion at Carhart’s clinic in Germantown, Md.
Carhart did not return messages left on his cellphone Monday. A woman who answered the phone at his Bellevue clinic said he would not be available for comment.
Maryland authorities confirmed the woman’s death but said they still are investigating the cause. Montgomery County (Md.) Police and the Medical Examiner’s Office declined to say whether she had been at Carhart’s clinic.
So far, abortion opponents are the only ones who have publicly linked the death to Carhart’s clinic.
Carhart is one of the nation’s few doctors who perform late-term abortions. He had done so at Bellevue’s Abortion and Contraception Clinic until 2010, when the Nebraska Legislature banned abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation.
He then opened the Germantown Reproductive Health Services clinic about 30 miles north of Washington, D.C.
Carhart also considered opening a late-term abortion clinic in Council Bluffs.
In response, Iowa lawmakers proposed legislation aimed at keeping him out of the state. . . .

Read the whole thing and notice that, like the Washington Post‘s Dan Morse, the World-Herald reporters don’t name Jennifer Morbelli as the victim, and make clear that they are merely reporting the assertions made by “abortion opponents.” Heaven forbid that any mainstream reporter should actually do some actual journalism the way “just a blogger” Jill Stanek did on this story.

If you know anything about Jill Stanek (which, of course, no liberal reporter would) you know that she wouldn’t report something like this unless she was absolutely certain of the facts, and so this concern-troll attitude that Stanek’s reporting “could not be immediately verified” bespeaks the incompetence and sloth of reporters who can’t be bothered, at least, to contact Stanek as a source. (Hint: She’s on Twitter.)

However, I don’t want to complain too much about this, because I’m genuinely grateful for any mainstream media coverage of this story. In fact, if some left-wing feminist blogger like Amanda Marcotte or Elspeth Reeve decided to do a post condemning pro-life bloggers for their coverage of Jennifer Morbelli’s death, I would absolutely welcome it. Please, feel free to denounce me by name, call me a hateful misogynist or whatever, and I don’t care: Just stop ignoring the story.

There will be a funeral in New Rochelle tomorrow morning — Ash Wednesday — and I defy anyone to say that funeral isn’t legitimate news.

 

 

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Professor on Aborted Babies: ‘I Look at Them Unflinchingly and See Meat’

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“I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.”
— Paul Z. Myers, University of Minnesota biology professor

UPDATE: Linked by Sister Toldjah — thanks! — and by Doug at Daley Gator, who sees “moral retardation” at work. Both relate this to the heinous case of Kermit Gosnell and, as further proof of his fanatical blindness, Professor Myers declared of the “house of horrors” in Philadelphia: “This is not about abortion.”

Ed Morrissey reports that Gosnell has been denied bail, and calls to our attention Michelle Malkin’s column explaining how the politics of “choice” made the Philadelphia horror possible:

[T]he grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP governor Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise – and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists. As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from [pro-life Democrat] Governor Casey to Governor Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

Read the rest of that. As for Professor Myers and other academic propagandists of the Culture of Death, I remind you of Abraham Lincoln’s remark that “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” And godlessness has been the official philosophy of American schools for more than one generation.

UPDATE II: Vox Day:

This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn’t dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly.

Maybe you want to read the extremely graphic Philadelphia grand jury report on Gosnell’s house of horrors. Or maybe it will suffice to see the jars of baby feet kept in the abortionist’s clinic.

Today is, after all, “Ask Them What They Mean by ‘Choice’ Day.” And there is a Memeorandum thread.

Jill Stanek on the Battle of Fitchburg

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America’s leading pro-life blogger features the story today:

I had no direct knowledge that pro-lifers would pitch a fit, I just knew no pro-life group anywhere would ever let [Planned Parenthood] into their community without raising the roof.

As I reminded readers yesterday, this all began last week when Da Tech Guy picked up a copy of the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise and discovered that Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts — with a grant of federal stimulus money — was planning to open a new clinic on Main Street in his hometown. This was indeed “a highly visible location,” as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette called it.

All politics is local and for six days I was based at Da Tech Guy’s home in Fitchburg while covering the Scott Brown Senate campaign. During that time, I visited Da Tech Guy’s parish church:

St. Anthony of Padua Church has traditionally served an Italian blue-collar congregation and the politicial views of those in the pews at 8 a.m. mass may not be indicative of all Catholics in Massachusetts. With that disclaimer, however, Martha Coakley may be on the verge of the most brutal Catholic backlash since the Inquisition.
The Democratic attorney general’s adamant support of late-term abortion obviously puts her at odds with faithful Catholics . . .

This was the context that made the story so striking. As I explained to someone at last night’s Brown victory celebration in D.C., Coakley won the Democratic primary on terms that ultimately doomed her in the general election. Coakley had declared that the health-care bill must include federal funding for abortion, including late-term abortion. This earned her support among Democratic primary voters, but it ceded the middle ground to Scott Brown.

Maybe you’re generally pro-choice and maybe you’re generally in favor of government health-care, but mandating federal funding for abortion? That’s certainly not a majoritarian position, and Scott Brown didn’t have to take a hard-core pro-life stance to put Coakley on the defensive on that issue. Blue-collar Catholics like the parishioners at St. Anthony’s lean toward Democrats on many issues, but Coakley had staked her candidacy on an issue that would cost her badly among such voters.

So in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s victory, Planned Parenthood announced it was going to open a clinic on Main Street in Fitchburg — heckuva coincidence, eh? The fact that this is funded by a reported $397,000 in federal stimulus money makes it a story of national consequence. Pro-lifers were fired up and ready for a fight, and despite a snowstorm yesterday, turnout was strong for their first protest:

A crowd of about 70 to 80 anti-abortion protesters waved signs and prayed Thursday on both sides of 391 Main St., where the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts plans to open an office this spring. . . .
Christine Hanley, who organized the protest as the chairwoman of the Fitchburg-Leominster Chapter of Mass Citizens for life, had hoped for a minimum of 20 protesters, so she was pleased to find the crowd exceeded her expectations.
“More people are coming all the time,” Hanley said during the protest on a snowy afternoon.
Father Robert Bruso, of St. Anthony de Padua Church in Fitchburg, participated in the protest.
“It’s really nothing the city of Fitchburg stands for,” said Bruso.

Expect many of Father Bruso’s flock to attend the City Council meeting in Fitchburg next week, and certainly you can expect to hear more about this battle in the near future. Da Tech Guy is on the story.

UPDATE: Don’t forget — Send Da Tech Guy to CPAC!