Four years ago, the Supreme Court effectively ended 50 years of bad law and handed abortion regulation back to the American “people and their elected representatives.” All of the doom and gloom the corporate media swore would happen because of this 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, it turns out, was a lie.
Media spent the months leading up to the decision mocking pro-lifers and their policies. When the Dobbs ruling was leaked and then officially posted, those same outlets insisted that the Supreme Court’s confirmation that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion created a “dystopian American reality.” Their emotional blackmail and on-camera blubbering were just the beginning of a years-long spiral and campaign to undermine the court and keep abortion propaganda alive and well with hopes of influencing the 2022 and 2024 elections.
The biggest falsehood touted by the propaganda press following Dobbs was that “women will die.” This fabrication that pro-lifers are on the hook for the deaths of women, many linked to the popular yet dangerous abortion pill, prevailed for years after the Supreme Court decision.
Women and countless babies certainly have died since Dobbs, but their deaths were not due to pro-life laws. On the contrary, the abortion activism amplified and fueled by corporate media played a role in the deaths of women due to the prevalence of mifepristone and malpractice.
One such example appeared in The Washington Post in July 2022, when a “gender” columnist claimed that laws limiting abortions are “hell on Earth.”
“Women in agony. Doctors afraid of easing their pain. Is this the post-Roe America antiabortion activists envisioned?” she wrote in the subhead.
Politico even tasked itself with conducting one-sided abortion surveys soliciting content for sob stories blaming Dobbs for Americans’ woes trying to fill prescriptions or get “emergency treatment for a miscarriage or pregnancy-related complication.”
What The Washington Post and other outlets lamenting the end of Roe failed to mention is that corporate media played a key role in scaring doctors and hospitals out of treating women in desperate need of emergency medical care. They repeatedly use stories of tragic miscarriages to con people into believing that the only way women suffering the spontaneous, devastating, and premature end of a pregnancy will be properly cared for is if they reject anything but abortion for all. One NPR headline insisted that “Losing a pregnancy could land you in jail in post-Roe America.”
On the contrary, none of the 50 states, even those that limit or outlaw abortion, criminalize treatment of complications from ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage. The very limited number of women, men, and doctors charged with abortion-related crimes were accused after evidence indicated they explicitly participated in attempts to kill unborn babies in violation of certain states’ laws.
The real harm after Dobbs, of course, came at the hands of the media’s Democrat allies who called for the violent destruction of the Supreme Court. Hundreds of pro-abortion activists, at the behest of the Biden White House, descended on Republican-nominated justices’ homes to intimidate and even assassinate them.
Legacy media couldn’t be bothered with documenting that “open season” on pro-lifers and the high bench, though. Instead, talking heads like ABC Senior Correspondent Terry Moran fanned the flames by falsely suggesting that Dobbs “changes the status of American women as citizens of the United States and as citizens of their states.” The assertion that women are “no longer full citizens” because certain states won’t allow them to kill their babies was repeated in headlines from The New York Times to The Nation.
Perhaps an even worse assertion appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The California newspaper’s article, headlined “Threats to criminalize out-of-state abortions are a scary reminder of 1850s America,” suggested that states’ attempts to enact popular abortion limits are somehow equivalent to the Fugitive Slave Act.
“The quarries this time aren’t Black slaves, but those who assist pregnant women to seek abortions out of state, including employers who pay for the travel and others who help them,” the paper claimed.
The meltdown didn’t stop there. Front pages were filled with horror stories of obstetrician-gynecologists fleeing pro-life states in droves and leaving “maternity care deserts” in their wake. On the contrary, research shows“there are no major changes in the supply of OBGYNs associated with the Dobbs decision.” In fact, in 2023, the year after Dobbs, 86.8 percent of all medical residency candidates applied in pro-life states, and “virtually all residency spots were filled.”
Vox similarly threatened “higher maternal mortality rates” post-Dobbs. The maternal mortality rate, however, declined in the years following the end of Roe.
Politico argued shortly after the 2022 midterms that abortion is a “litmus test in Republican presidential politics” that would “define the [2024] presidential race.” In reality, abortion ranked behind the economy, foreign policy, crime, immigration, and more as top concerns for voters heading into the 2024 polls. Even during the primaries, abortion was not the touchstone Democrats and their allies in the press tried to make it.
Another spin pushed by the media in 2022 was that Republicans would find a way to outlaw abortion entirely. Those same outlets declared months later that the GOP could not celebrate Dobbs and support federal legislation like Sen. Lindsey Graham’s “cruel” ban on killing babies in the womb after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that would bring the U.S. up to speed with the abortion policies in most European countries.
“It’s either disingenuous, constitutionally illiterate, or both for Democrats to claim that a Republican push to ban some or all abortions at the federal level is out of line with the pro-life movement’s goal of the past 50 years,” Federalist Assignment Editor Elle Purnell noted in September 2022.
While corporate media have done their best to muddy the waters and keep Democrats’ abortion delusions at the center of the news cycle, what Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Dobbs majority opinion about the future of abortion law has remained relatively true: The people and their elected representatives are in charge of abortion policy.
Any perversion of this parameter isn’t at the hands of pro-lifers or Republicans who pass limits on ending life in the womb, but is solely due to Democrats and abortion activists who conjured deceptive abortion ballot measure battles in key states and started sending stockpiles of dangerous abortion drugs into states where they are banned.
