National Public Radio regularly crosses the line separating pro-abortion bias (practically a given at elitist media outlets) to outright abortion advocacy, painting it as a useful health care procedure in two stories. Kate Wells reported Wednesday on the question dear to the heart of NPR: “As abortion access shrinks, could urgent care centers help?”, a story by Kate Wells “produced in partnership with KFF Health News.”
Providing abortions was the last thing Shawn Brown thought she'd be doing when she opened an urgent care clinic in Marquette, a small port town on the remote shores of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
But she also wasn't expecting the Planned Parenthood in Marquette to shut down last spring. Roughly 1,100 patients relied on that clinic each year for cancer screenings, IUD insertions, and medication abortions. Now the area has no other in-person resource for abortions. "It's a 500-mile stretch of no access," Brown said.
Marquette is a college town, the home of Northern Michigan University. But NPR found good news!
The idea that urgent cares "could be an untapped solution to closures for abortion clinics across the country is really exciting," said Kimi Chernoby, the chief operating and legal officer at FemInEM, a national nonprofit that works to improve professional training and patient outcomes for women in emergency medicine.
No ethical or moral views against abortion were raised, just utilitarian ones involving the hassle of state laws that make procuring abortion harder.
As pills by mail become the next major target for abortion opponents, Chernoby said that it will be critical to offer more care in more physical locations….
"It's a wonderful idea, but it's potentially got major pitfalls," said David Cohen, a professor at the Drexel University Kline School of Law who studies abortion access.
If abortion access isn't a core part of a health organization's mission, "do you want to be on that list? I don't know if you do," Cohen said….
The only hint of a negative was a revealing moment when a client at the Marquette Urgent Care clinic was adamant she didn’t want to see an ultrasound of her baby.
"I just don't want to hear a heartbeat or anything like that," [the client] said.
"Definitely not," [Viktoria ]Koskenoja said.
Why not? But answering that would involve journalistic curiosity, not NPR’s hard stance of pro-abortion advocacy.
Wells is the same abortion-celebrating journalist who aired audio of an abortion procedure at Northland Family Planning outside Detroit in 2022.
NPR health reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin reported on Monday for NPR’s All Things Considered, “Abortion pills would be safe even over-the-counter, a new study says." It's unsafe for the unborn. Simmons-Duffin which treated the profound decision of whether to abort a baby with all the import of stopping by a 7-11:
Imagine that you're pregnant, a few weeks in, and you decide you want an abortion. You walk into a retail pharmacy, and pick up a package on the shelf that says "medication abortion kit." You buy it and walk out, and end your early pregnancy at home.
"It's time that the general public understands that this could be a reality," says Dr. Daniel Grossman, part of the research team that published a study Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine exploring this issue.
It was a shame to NPR and Grossman that "Over-the-counter abortion medication is not a reality currently...."
"There's so much discussion about the restrictions on medication abortion that are not evidence-based," says Grossman, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. He points to decades of research establishing the safety and efficacy of the two drugs used in medication abortion. "It's exciting to see science pointing us in another direction, where access could be expanded."
The excitement-inducing “safety” of abortion drugs is certainly up for debate, considering what happens when the drugs are used correctly. The study used a hook for the story seemed awfully weak, involving patients examining “prototype packaging for what an over-the-counter medication abortion package might look like.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a doctor, was the only dart to penetrate the pro-choice bubble:
[Cassidy] added that people should "not normalize a procedure whose intent is to end a life."
