Media Bias on Abortion Issue

Imagine that a movement started in America to repeal the Bill of Rights and establish a religious dictatorship, creating slavery of blacks and women. Though this is a minority view, the debate rages. Would we have to endure a four-part epic on whether the media are being fair enough to the would-be slave masters? Would we have to listen to their cries that they’re being “stereotyped?”

People trying to outlaw abortion don’t like being “stereotyped” as ignorant, even though they claim a fertilized egg is a “human being” or a “child,” so that even early abortions are “murder” and “baby-killing.” Science knows that a gene package is not the same as a living person. Abortion foes do not. John Wilke, who you call “no extremist,” wrote in The Times last March that a human life is “complete and intact at fertilization,” and that abortion is “killing another citizen” who is being “discriminated (against) by place of residence--the womb.” The ignorance of these people is no stereotype.

They don’t like being “stereotyped” as heartless, even though they are so fixated on the egg that they care nothing about the woman or girl who carries it. They would force women to bear children against their will, dismissing their circumstances or how it would ruin their lives.

They want to legislate their own political and religious beliefs on everyone else’s private lives, enforced by the muscle of the state.

If anti-abortion crusaders are being “stereotyped,” then it is stereotyping to call a weasel a fur-bearing mammal.

MARK LEINWAND

Woodland Hills