PBS’s post-Dobbs abortion coverage has been all one-way: No celebration of saving babies or showing respect for the culture of life. Instead, the focus has been 100% on lost opportunities to abort, with the hardest cases nationwide reliably rounded up and presented as commonplace, leaning on the alleged horrors occurring in red states that have instituted abortion bans.
Sarah Varney, correspondent for KFF Health News, has been providing a strong pro-abortion lean in her reporting for the tax-supported PBS NewsHour ever since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
On Thursday night, Varney marveled at a new left-wing legal attack on Texas’s state abortion ban going on in the state’s liberal capital Austin. Varney compared it favorably to a previous lawsuit elsewhere in Texas over the abortion pill mifepristone. That case came before one Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, described offensively by Varney as having “used this very extremist Christian language in his, in the courtroom and in his decision.”
On May 5, Varney reported dramatically from the Idaho-Washington state border like she was at the Berlin Wall in 1989, lamenting a new Idaho law banning minors from crossing state lines to have an abortion without parental consent. First she went to the University of Idaho, where a young female college student journalist was (surprise) vehemently against the new law.
Varney: Nestled in Northern Idaho’s rolling hills sits the college town of Moscow, home to the University of Idaho. Mackenzie Davidson, a budding journalist, works for the school newspaper, The Argonaut. Her editor asked her to write an editorial on a new law that bans so-called abortion trafficking. Before you were assigned to write this article, did you know anything about this abortion trafficking ban?
Davidson: I had heard of it, but I didn’t know a whole lot about it.
Varney: Did it surprise you that this was even a proposal here to prevent teenagers from leaving the state?
Davidson: Ever since Roe got overturned, it kind of felt like, every day, you’re waking up and more and more of your rights are being taken away.
Varney talked to local Planned Parenthood executive Karl Eastlund, who told Varney the law is “going to make it harder for patients who need care the most to actually get the care that they deserve and need.”
By contrast, she offered emotional blackmail in a brief back-and-forth with law student Ryan Alexander, a pro-life supporter of the “travel ban.”
Varney: I asked him about teens who face abuse or have absent parents….for girls that are experiencing that now, what would you have them do?
Varney had also reported from Idaho days earlier, May 1, on the state’s total ban on abortion. NewsHour host Amna Nawaz set the scene for “this growing crisis” spurred by the Roe v. Wade overturn, claiming “From Tennessee to Texas to Idaho, OB-GYNs are beginning to pack up and leave.”
Varney mourned “Over beers at a local Sandpoint, Idaho, brewery, residents held a wake of sorts….to mourn the closure of the labor-and-delivery ward at Bonner General, the city’s only hospital. The hospital in part blamed Idaho’s legal and political climate.”
She found Dr. Amelia Huntsberger, who dramatically claimed: “This isn’t a safe place to practice medicine anymore.” Huntsberger also fired: “I think it sends a really powerful message to the citizens of Idaho, that the legislature doesn’t think that the protection of the health of pregnant patients is important.”
So much for getting both sides from a tax-supported newscast. It’s all about women seeking “life-saving” abortions.
A group of Texas women seeking to block a portion of their state’s abortion law are in court this week testifying that the state’s restrictions put their lives in jeopardy.
For more on this, @TheStephSy spoke with @SarahVarney4. https://t.co/x2wbLMyl6O pic.twitter.com/xY4tzJG3Nv
— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) July 20, 2023
These biased abortion segments were sponsored in part by Consumer Cellular, and taxpayers like you.