Nancy Northup

'Texas All But Guts Roe v. Wade,' MSNBC Moans As Female Federal Judges Uphold Clinic-Regulation Law
By Ken Shepherd | March 28, 2014 | 1:45 PM EDT

Yesterday an all-female 3-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas's abortion clinic regulation law. As you can imagine, this has got MSNBC, the "war on women" network,  outraged.

"Texas all but guts Roe v. Wade" grouses the teaser headline for Irin Carmon's March 28 story on msnbc.com. "One third of Texas’s abortion clinics have closed. That’s not bad enough for these female judges. Next stop: The Supreme Court," added the caption below a photo of pro-choice protesters. The story itself, by a 2013 recipient of the New York Abortion Access Fund's "Champion of Choice" award, was fraught with lamentations about the alleged injustice of the ruling and ended on a hopeful note that maybe, just maybe, the Supreme Court would ride to the rescue of the abortion lobby (excerpted in full below; emphases mine):

NPR Wants to Make America Safe for Sixth-Grade Sex
By Tim Graham | May 4, 2013 | 7:24 AM EDT

NPR has a seriously bad habit of running “news” stories that are stuffed with liberals...who then aren’t called liberals. On Thursday’s All Things Considered, NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner reported on how Team Obama is queasy about letting girls under 15 – middle-school girls -- get access to “emergency contraceptives,” even after a federal judge mandated they be sold to all ages. 

As Rovner put it, “the administration's decision to appeal that ruling has outraged many of the president's allies in the women's health community.” That’s what they call the aggressively “sex-positive” feminists. The only “conservative” view in this story was...Obama! Well, that's not fair. The Obama quotes they used were liberal-pleasers, too. Everyone else wanted to make America safe for sixth-grade sex.

Chris Matthews Compares Kansas Abortion Regulations to Jim Crow Efforts to Disenfranchise Blacks
By Ken Shepherd | July 1, 2011 | 1:00 PM EDT

In the warped mind of MSNBC's Chris Matthews, efforts to regulate the practice of abortion are morally equivalent to literacy tests in the South that were aimed at preventing African-Americans from voting.

The "Hardball" host made that puzzling and arguably insulting comparison on the June 30 program in a segment titled "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

NPR Can't Find Anyone Who Supported Defunding 'Noncontroversial' Title X
By Matthew Balan | March 21, 2011 | 6:32 PM EDT

NPR's Liz Halloran touted the federal government's Title X subsidy of contraceptives as "largely noncontroversial" in a Monday article on NPR.org, despite the House of Representatives' 240-185 vote in February to defund the program. Halloran also quoted exclusively from liberal Title X supporters or from conservatives who had second thoughts about targeting the program.

It only took her two paragraphs for the correspondent to use this slanted label of the federal program in her article, "Abortion Foes Target Family Planning Program." She also highlighted the longstanding funding of "family planning programs that provide contraceptive and related health and family services to millions of low-income women and men" and noted how Title X passed with "bipartisan support in Congress."

Halloran continued that "Title X, which serves more than 5 million men and women annually, is on House Republicans' chopping block. Supporters of defunding have characterized it as an effort to strip funds from Planned Parenthood and other organizations that use other funds to provide legal abortions, without singling out any particular group. The House in February voted 240-185 to defund Title X in the current budget year." But instead of tracking down one of the representatives who voted for this, or from one of their allies in the conservative movement, the journalist turned to a Republican skeptic:

WaPo 'On Faith' Laments the 'Tragic Consequences' of Pro-Life Catholic Church
By Sarah Knoploh | June 21, 2010 | 4:09 PM EDT
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, was The Washington Post’s “On Faith” guest columnist on June 21. Predictably, she used the opportunity to bash the Catholic Church’s abortion policy. In “Should Church control access to health care?” Northup charged that the Catholic Church wields too much influence over policy decisions dealing with abortion.

Northup complained, “This year at home, we saw the U.S. government give the Conference on Catholic Bishops veto power over the health-care reform bill, and in the end, millions of American women were left with a policy that restricts insurance coverage for abortion services even for those who pay for their insurance with their own hard-earned dollars.”