In covering the Obama edict, those in the media greatly missed the point: they casted the problem as if it dealt solely with birth control which was not the case.
In a name association game, when most people hear the words “birth control,” they think of the pill. Most Americans, including Catholics, treat the pill as something altogether different from abortion. So when pollsters asked about the Obama healthcare plan, framing the issue as one about birth control, it was never going to set off the alarms: once abortion was mentioned everything changed. Consider the evidence.
On February 9 we conducted a Lexis-Nexis search linking the words “Catholic” “Obama” and “birth control,” and found that in the previous week, there were 345 stories with those terms (there is always some repetition, particularly with wire services). Within this same grouping, when the words “morning-after pill” were included, the number dropped to 62; when “abortifacients” was linked to the initial three terms, there were 31 stories; and when the term “abortion-inducing drugs” was included, the number dropped to 20.
In other words, the media framed the issue in terms of the least offensive issue.
Add to this the fact that so many Americans just take a glimpse at the headline, which uniformly cites birth control, and the result is a massive distortion of the truth.
The bigger question is: Why does the Obama plan include drugs that induce abortion? Because that’s where he wants to go—he would like nothing better than to force all religious institutions to provide abortion coverage—and this is his way of prying the door open.
This issue is, first and foremost, about the First Amendment right to religious liberty. Secondly, it is about abortion. The lust for abortion that this administration has is unparalleled, and its unrelenting drive to shove its radical secular agenda down the throats of the faithful is equally unprecedented.
