Blake’s Blog

Found this here.

See The Vent video here.

Keeping with last night’s theme, I thought I’d point out yet another instance of the MSM (this time The New York Times) irresponsibly refusing to actually check their sources simply so they can disseminate their Leftist ideals.

In an effort to promote a pro-abortion platform, a cover story about abortions in El Salvador in The New York Times Magazine on April 9 ambiguously referred to a “few” women in El Salvador who had been jailed for 30 years for having the unborn children aborted. Of the “few” women jailed, the article focused on one Carmen Climaco. According to the article, Climaco was serving a 30 year jail term for aborting her 18 week old fetus.

From the Times article…

“I was there to see Carmen Climaco. She is now 26 years old, four years into her 30-year sentence,” wrote Hitt. The New York Times article concludes, “She’d had a clandestine abortion at 18 weeks, not all that different from D.C.’s, something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.”

Though what can easily be perceived as the author’s (Jack Hitt) bold attempt at inflaming U.S. public opinion in order to put pressure on the El Salvador government for their barbaric practice of jailing women who have abortions (interesting that the U.S. isn’t viewed as barbaric for the policy of condoning the deaths of unborn children…), the focus of his article is based on a whopper of a lie.

You see, in reality, Ms. Climaco was actually convicted of infanticide for strangling her newborn baby ( source 1 | source 2 ). The body of the child was found by police hidden in a box wrapped in bags under the bed of Mrs. Climaco. Autopsy reports showed that the baby was indeed a full-term delivery, and that its breathing was normal at the time of birth. The official cause of death was asphyxia by strangulation.

As it happens, Mr. Hitt relied on a pro-abortion group (IPAS) for his information. Moreover, not only is this a pro-abortion organization, but they also sell products that “doctors” use to perform abortions. Know what an aspirator is? Well, it’s one of the products they sell…

I’ll let you put the pieces together of how that works.

Various pro-abortion organizations have recycled Ms. Climaco’s story in an effort to promote pro-abortion sentiments in the U.S. via scare tactics. Many have sense pulled the story, but the IPAS is sticking to its guns…

On December 31st, The New York Times called attention to the tragic situation faced by women in El Salvador who must make crucial reproductive choices.

The arguments against abortion are long, and I won’t get in to them here, but the tactics The New York Times is willing to employ are absolutely despicable. Compound this with the fact that the NYT editors refuse to acknowledge the error. They refuse to run a correction. They refuse to reprimand the author. They refuse to do anything.

The response said that while the “fair and dispassionate” story noted Ms. Climaco’s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article “concluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.” The response ended by stating, “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.”

Yeah, no reason at all, right?

To express concerns to the New York Times:

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Chairman & Publisher:
publisher@nytimes.com

Scott H. Heekin-Canedy, President, General Manager
president@nytimes.com

See the full decision of the court in the Climaco case (in English):
Decision

See the full decision of the court in the Climaco case (in Spanish):
Decision

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under MSM Treason. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.