This is how NPR is able to justify abortion broadcast

By Tara Sander Lee, Op-ed contributor Monday, November 14, 2022

The headquarters for National Public Radio, or NPR, are seen in Washington, DC, September 17, 2013. The USD 201 million building, which opened in 2013, serves as the headquarters of the media organization that creates and distributes news, information and music programming to 975 independent radio stations throughout the US, reaching 26 million listeners each week. | AFP via Getty Image/Saul Loeb

Ordinary Americans listened with shock and horror recently as National Public Radio callously broadcast audio of a pregnant woman having an abortion procedure at 11 weeks.

On their radios, the entire nation heard the electric vacuum aspirator turn on, which has 10 to 20 times the suction power of a household vacuum, while a woman in stirrups awaits the abortionist’s procedure. Within minutes, the unborn baby issuctioned from the mother’s womb despite the woman’s cry of, “I can’t,” with the nurse calmly reassuring her that she can, and then exclaiming once the baby was gone, “You did it!”

Never once does NPR stop and question the diabolical nature of the act — the killing of an innocent unborn child. Nor does NPR “follow the science” about babies at 11 weeks of gestation or discuss common complications and aftereffects of an abortion.

One way NPR and other pro-abortion advocates justify such heinous acts is to convince themselves and the public that the unborn child is not a real human being — to deny the science.

But one can no longer plead ignorance and claim that the unborn child is simply a “blob of tissue” or as NPR described the baby, just “pregnancy tissue.” Science is simply too advanced to ignore the truth.

Today, modern science reveals the humanity of the unborn child developing inside a woman, like never before. The grainy black and white dots of ultrasound from the 1970s have been replaced with crisp and clear 3D and 4D images that reveal the developing unborn child in stunning detail throughout all stages of pregnancy. And in part, because of these advancements, almost every day we hear another story about how cutting-edge medical care is using life-saving surgical techniques to treat tiny unborn babies inside the womb before they are born. These unborn children are treated as distinct patients, separate from their mother.

The medical news website MedPage Today recently published an article, “It is time for non-confrontational discussions of the unborn child’s humanity,” authored by anonymous pediatricians, who stated “… whether a child is inside their mother does not matter when deciding to treat them with care and dignity … does our location determine our value? Sophisticated treatments of pre-born children prove that intrauterine location does not determine our value as human beings.”

Yet somehow, in a strange Orwellian-type society, when an abortion clinic uses a high-powered suction machine to intentionally end the beating heart of an unborn baby, these facts are twisted and ignored to justify such inhumane treatment. The baby is no longer a “baby” separate from the mother. The blatant disregard for life, when convenient to pro-abortion propaganda, is nauseating.

It's time to review the scientific facts regarding the revealed humanity of the unborn child.

What NPR described as “pregnancy tissue” during the abortion broadcast, was in fact an 11 week-old baby that had fully-formed fingers and toes, eyelids and a nose, and had already displayed a preference for using the right or left hand when sucking his or her thumb. By 11 weeks, the baby already had 4,000 distinct anatomical parts, or 90% of the named body parts found in an adult.

By 11 weeks, just seconds before the abortion procedure, the baby was alive and active. In fact, scientists have determined that at 11 weeks the unborn baby has brain activity and doesn’t stay still for more than 13 minutes at a time.

Prior to being aborted, the baby had a beating heart. Science confirms that by 11 weeks, the baby’s heart would have been beating rhythmically with a heart rate of 168 beats per minute and would have already beat over 9 million times.If the abortionist hadn’t ended the baby’s life, science tells us that this same heart could have beat 45 million more times before birth, and over 3 billion more times into adulthood, constantly pumping blood through the entire human body for a lifetime.

Once again, NPR and the mainstream media deny and obscure what science reveals about the humanity of every unborn child, and what we instinctively know to be true.

Dr. Tara Sander Lee, Ph.D., is a Harvard-trained scientist, director of life sciences at Charlotte Lozier Institute, and serves on the Biden Administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Infant and Maternal Mortality.