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Every now and then, reseachers/activists in a think tank somewhere pull out a major study from the past, compare its data with that in similar studies and then announce a few specific conclusions in a press conference.
In America there are two career fields that have a disproportionate number of agnostics and atheists: scientists and stand-up comedians.
On May 25, I tweeted out the image at the top of this post with the note “WaPo story about 12 of 16 surgical abortion clinics in MD having a variety of failures gets this headline?”
A story in Thursday’s Daily Mirror about the first English patient suffering from dementia to have traveled to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich to kill himself by physician assisted suicide has prompted several “me too” stories in the British press.
Did you hear about the anteater that conceived a baby even though she had no male mate around? I mean, she had a mate, but he was removed from her area longer than the six months required to gestate a baby anteater. Theories for how this miracle happened include the very non-miraculous idea that the mommy anteater and daddy anteater mated through a fence and the somewhat more mysterious idea that the pregnancy was paused or that implantation was somehow delayed.
The first question I faced, in this week’s “Crossroads” interview, sounded relatively simple: Why did journalists struggle to use the word “fetus” accurately when covering the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell?
Once again, let’s turn to the dictionary and that tricky word “fetus,” which has through the decades been at the heart of so many bitter newsroom arguments about abortion, morality, religion, science and law.
My goal is to write a relatively short post about a very, very long Washington Post story, a Style section story that I urge all GetReligion readers to check out.
There is nothing new about journalists arguing about the loaded language that surrounds our public debates about abortion.
