The Gosnell case: if you want to get an abortion story on the BBC, make sure it's not pro-life

The second story on the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News last night was about an Indian dentist who died after being denied an abortion in an Irish hospital. She pleaded with the doctors to perform the procedure, but was refused, and eventually died of septicemia. “It also shone a harsh light on the confused state of Ireland’s abortion law,” the reporter informed us. But, hang on - Irish doctors can perform an abortion if the mother’s life is at risk, as it evidently was in this case, so what we seem to be dealing with here is medical incompetence rather than confused abortion laws.

Okay, Savita Halappanavar's story is a very sad one – but the second biggest story in the world yesterday, given that the first was the search for one of the Boston bombers?

Meanwhile, there’s another abortion story unfolding in America, where a licenced Philadelphia abortionist, Kermit Gosnell, is on trial accused of performing illegal abortions and of unlawfully killing seven babies and a mother. Accounts of the barbaric horrors that allegedly took place in Dr Gosnell’s clinic are almost unbearable to read. Here’s what the grand jury report into the case had to say:

"This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy - and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels - and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths."

A former employee described hearing a baby screaming after being delivered: “It sounded like a little alien”. Another described a large baby being aborted into a toilet, where it made swimming motions with its arms, apparently in an instinctive attempt to save itself. (The Atlantic recently described the case here.)

I can only find one article about this trial on the BBC website, and there’s no suggestion that it has yet been covered by TV or Radio News. There’s a chance, I suppose, that BBC News will cover the case once the trial ends. But maybe they won’t, because, you see, the BBC thinks abortion is inherently a good thing, and it assumes that those who are against it are all compassionless right-wing religious maniacs who probably belong to the Tea Party.

Apparently, America’s liberal mainstream media are also doing their best to cover up the Gosnell case (liberals burst into tears when psychopathic killers are sentenced to death, but the wholesale slaughter of babies is evidently a matter of indifference to them - somehow, they're not "victimy" enough).

Here, the Guardian – that vile rag – has adopted the sort of bizarre moral position which only makes sense to left-wingers: it blames pro-lifers for what happened at Gosnell’s clinic. No, honestly, I'm not making this up  – if you're in need of an emetic, you can read Jill Fillipovic's farrago of "wimmin's" nonsense here.

I'll be watching with interest to see how the BBC deals with the Gosnell trial when it ends: if it fails to give it at least as much prominence to it as it gave to last night's sad story from Ireland, it'll confirm that abortion is yet another topic on which the corporation has renounced unbiased reporting in favour of propaganda.