By Jeffrey Meyer
It’s amazing how within a single one-hour television program, the same host can provide balanced reporting on one story but provide completely one-sided coverage of another. For once on the issue of gun control, MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts provided a balanced perspective of the issue at hand.
The same unfortunately cannot be said of abortion, as on April 2, Roberts featured Ilyse Hogue, President of NARAL Pro-Choice America for a one-sided discussion on, “another western state cracking down on abortion rights.” Of course, Roberts failed to bring on a pro-life activist on to challenge the abortion lobby activist, who trashed as unconstitutional and dangerous for women’s health recent pro-life measures passed by state legislatures in North Dakota and Kansas.
Roberts began the advocacy segment by asking Hogue:
Is this just an indicator that no matter how many state legislatures try to keep chipping away at Roe v. Wade both sides are continuing to fight on?
This allowed Ms. Hogue to begin her rant against pro-life Americans, claiming that:
What we’re seeing, Thomas, is a disturbing pattern where women in America are living in two vastly different realities, some places where they actually have the full range of reproductive choices that allow them the independence and autonomy that we define as uniquely American and others where they’re being told no you’re actually a second class citizen and you’re not allowed to make the choices that men would make between them and their doctors.
After allowing Hogue to slam pro-lifers as wanting women to be “second-class citizens,” Roberts ridiculously asked Ms. Hogue whether or not new laws requiring doctors who perform abortions to be required to have local hospital privileges will put women’s health in danger:
Do these type of strict laws that are looking to clamp down and totally do away with abortion and what Roe v. Wade provides in this country, do they make the life of the mother much more dangerous? For a woman that’s trying to seek proper treatment for what her concerns are. I mean, these laws really limit the available options.
For some bizarre reason, both Roberts and Hague believe that having access to a hospital if there are complications during an abortion puts women’s health in risk. Having access to facilities with operating rooms, sterile equipment, doctors and nurses is risky according to the pro-abortion activist Hogue and Thomas Roberts.
Ms. Hague was then allowed to spew numerous false statements about such laws, claiming that, “Pre-Roe, illegal abortion was the top killer of women of child bearing age in this country.” As Mediaite’s Noah Rothman points out, this myth has been rebuked by FactCheck.org- no right-wing hack site it, by the way..
It seems that there is only room for one balanced segment during a single show on MSNBC, and abortion is not one of those subjects that Mr. Roberts deems worthy of having a discussion with a pro-life supporter.
Editor’s note. This appeared at http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/jeffrey-meyer/2013/04/02/msnbcs-roberts-does-requiring-abortionists-have-hospital-privileges-m