AP tells reporters to call crisis pregnancy centers ‘anti-abortion centers’

 

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Washington D.C., Feb 6, 2023 / 13:21 pm (CNA).

The Associated Press (AP) issued new guidelines advising reporters not to use the terms “crisis pregnancy center” or “pregnancy resource center” but to instead refer to centers that offer pro-life counseling and support as “anti-abortion centers.”

Reporters should “avoid potentially misleading terms such as pregnancy resource centers or pregnancy counseling centers,” because “these terms don’t convey that the centers’ general aim is to prevent abortions,” according to the AP’s Abortion Topical Guide.

The AP publishes the most widely used style guide, which journalists and editors across the country look to determine proper rules for coverage. According to the Daily Signal, the AP made the rule change in November 2022.

In its updated guidance, the AP states that though the centers provide “counseling, material support and/or housing,” because their purpose is to “divert or discourage women from having abortions” they should be labeled “anti-abortion centers.”

The new AP policy suggests the term “crisis pregnancy center” be used only if placed within quotation marks and if it is explained that its purpose is to “dissuade people from getting an abortion.”

The AP instructs reporters to frame the abortion debate as “anti-abortion” or “abortion rights” and to not use the term “pro-life” or “pro-choice.”

Reporters are also advised not to talk about a fetal heartbeat when referring to laws that ban abortion after a detectable heartbeat. Rather, the guide says, they should use the term “cardiac activity” as “the embryo isn’t yet a fetus and it has only begun forming a rudimentary heart.”

“The Associated Press shows itself to be tongue-tied with political correctness in trying to finesse how to explain organizations dedicated to public service,” Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist at Students for Life of America, told CNA.

“Without any sense of irony, they want to call Pregnancy Resource Centers ‘anti-abortion centers,’ diminishing the love and support such nonprofits offer to mothers and their children, born and preborn,” Hamrick said. “With that logic, hospitals must be ‘anti-death centers’ and our food support through the federal government named ‘anti-starving’ programs.”

Crisis pregnancy centers, which typically offer pregnant women and families free resources and baby materials, have faced a spate of attacks, vandalism, and acts of intimidation since May 2022, when the Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked.

According to the Family Research Council, more than 100 pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations have been attacked or vandalized.

See CNA’s coverage of the attacks against pregnancy resource centers and pro-life groups and churches below.

See CNA article for full interactive map.

Some Democratic politicians, such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have called for a “crackdown” on crisis pregnancy centers. In an August 2022 speech on the U.S. Senate floor, Warren decried pregnancy centers as “organizations that deliberately deceive women and girls who are seeking help to terminate a pregnancy.”

In another viral video, Warren said pregnancy centers “torture” pregnant women and called for them to be shut down across the nation.


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3 Comments

  1. All’s fair. Then AP and all follow through and call abortion centers antilife centers. Antilife is exactly what Planned Parenthood and the like are, as is the current executive administration.
    Sen Elizabeth Warren typifies the culture of death mentality that sullies American Constitutional democracy and degrades humanness. A perversion of justice that seeks to criminalize opposition. A perverse satanically conceived mentality that is anti God antilife anti justice.
    Christians will likely be subject to more and worse unless there’s a spiritually miraculous turnaround. As such we may be compelled to be saintly.

  2. And why aren’t “news reporters” relabeled as “anti-news distorters;”
    Or the AP as “Abortion Promoters” rather than Ass-ociated Press;
    Or the AP newsprint as “news-pimp,”
    Or abortion centers as “anti-life centers,”
    Or, matching the AP’s new “cardiac activity,” the AP itself as “brain-stem addictivity”?

    From history, these euphemisms:

    “I know of not a single case where anyone came out of the chambers alive” (Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess on Zyklon B gas, 1947) and “It never ever results in live births” (an experienced abortionist on dissection and extraction, 1981);

    “The subjects were forced to undergo death-dealing experiments ‘without receiving anesthetics’” (Dachau freezing experiments, 1942) and “the fetuses are fully alive when we cut their heads off, but anesthetics are definitely unnecessary” (Fetal researcher Dr. Martti Kekomaki, 1980);

    “No criticism was raised” (conference of German physicians to the Ravenbrueck sulfanilamide experiments, Berlin, May 1943) and “no one ever raised an eyebrow” (meeting of American pediatricians to an experiment involving beheading of aborted babies, San Francisco, 1973); and

    “What should we do with this garbage” (Treblinka, 1942) and “an aborted baby is just garbage” (fetal researcher Dr. Martti Kekomaki, 1980).

    In Mein Kampf (1925) Adolf Hitler referred to Jews as “a parasite in the body of other peoples”; fifty years later, the year of Roe v. Wade, a radical feminist group branded the unborn as “a parasite within the mother’s body.”

2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. AP tells reporters to call crisis pregnancy centers ‘anti-abortion centers’ | Passionists Missionaries Kenya, Vice Province of St. Charles Lwanga, Fathers & Brothers
  2. AP tells reporters to call crisis pregnancy centers ‘anti-abortion centers’ | Franciscan Sisters of St Joseph (FSJ) , Asumbi Sisters Kenya

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