The BBC’s political editor for Northern Ireland has referred to the picture of a premature baby on a pro-life postcard as a foetus.
The insensitive comments were made live on BBC Newsline, by Mark Davenport, just hours before a law imposing Europe’s most extreme abortion legislation on the province came into force.
He said, “when I came down from the Stormont Assembly I passed some security staff who were still sorting through boxes and boxes of postcards with pictures of a 27-week old foetus on them, and that came from pro-life campaigners who were determined that the law should not be changed.”
The postcards in question were printed by pro-life campaign group Both Lives Matter and feature a picture of a baby boy, called Paul, from Belfast born at 27 weeks and two days.
They urged Members of Northern Ireland’s Legislative Assembly to reconvene Stormont by October 21, so that the extreme abortion regime, that came into force today, could be halted.
Paul is now 24 years old but may not have survived if he was born today. As of Tuesday, abortion is now available for any reason, up to 28 weeks, legalising sex-selective and disability-selective abortion including abortion for Down’s syndrome, cleft lip and club foot.
In the build-up to a debate on the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill, the BBC drew attention to an amendment, that eventually brought Europe’s most extreme abortion regime to Ireland, calling it an “exciting titbit“.
For a number of years the BBC’s ‘News Style Guide’ has required their journalists to ‘avoid pro-abortion, and use pro-choice instead’. When it comes to describing the pro-life position they advise journalists to ‘use anti-abortion rather than pro-life’.
The BBC has also been caught suppressing polling they commissioned for a documentary, called Abortion on Trial, which showed that there was no widespread support for changing the existing law.
Instead, in the documentary that aired, the BBC cherry-picked minority results from polling that supported what appeared to be a clear bias in the documentary towards removing the current legal restrictions and safeguards around abortion.
The same documentary was also criticised for dropping a pregnant woman from their panel who had chosen not to abort her daughter who had Down’s syndrome.
Spokesperson for Right to Life UK, Catherine Robinson said:
“This insensitive comment from the BBC’s political editor for Northern Ireland is just the latest in a long list of actions highlighting their institutional bias against the pro-life movement, and for the abortion lobby.”
