Emily’s Early Entrance

Emily Harrington is a happy and healthy seven year-old. By looking at her, you’d never know that she was born extremely premature. On March 25, 1996, she was born at 23 weeks of pregnancy or approximately only 21 weeks after she was conceived. Weighing a slight one pound and eight ounces, the doctors told her father, Mike Isom, that Emily had a one in three chance of surviving. An undetected infection in her mother’s uterus was the reason behind Emily’s early entrance into the visible world.

Emily spent the first four and half months after her birth living in an incubator and was on a ventilator for 6 months. Before she was released from the hospital almost a year after her birth, Emily had come close to dying four times as she had heart surgery and had to have some of her intestines removed because of internal hemorrhaging.

Mike remembers how his daughter was when she was born. He remembers how she would grip his finger with her minuscule hands and how he could tell whether she was happy or sad by the way her face looked. Mike is against all abortions, but it especially bothers him to think that children who are the age and size of his daughter when she was born are being legally aborted everyday in this country. His personal experience with a child who was born at 23 weeks gives Mike a clear image of what a partially-born child at this stage of development would look like. Mike describes partial-birth abortion as “gruesome and barbaric” and is glad that steps have been taken to make this procedure illegal in our state and nation.

Mike’s opinion about partial-birth abortion is shared by the large majority of Americans even though the mainstream media hardly ever actually tells its readers or viewers what partial-birth abortion is. Legislation to ban partial-birth abortion has been working its way in various forms through both state and national legislatures for 8 agonizing years. But how often will a news story describe the procedure in question? Hardly ever and in very fleeting detail if at all. Actual descriptions of the partial-birth abortion are much more likely to be found on the editorial page in letters to the editor or in the editorial columns of prolife columnists.

A new study released by the Media Research Center showed that in 217 stories about partial-birth abortion on NBC, ABC, or CBS only 18 of these stories contained a basic description of the procedure, and 15 of those descriptions happened in stories airing before 1998. So, in the last 5 years, the three biggest television networks in America have only described what happens in a partial-birth abortion a mere 3 times and all of these descriptions were on CBS.

It’s amazing that nationally watched stations and reporters can so often skim over the basics of a story. In elementary school, we all learned the basic 5 W’s of a story: Who? What? When? Where? and Why? Yet news stories consistently leave out the “What?” with regards to partial-birth abortion. They never tell their readers or viewers what partial-birth abortion is. Why? Well, a 1995 study, whose results were published in the Spring 2001 issue of The Public Interest, polled “reporters and editors at major national newspapers, news magazines and wire services” and found that “nearly all of the media elite (97 percent) agreed that ‘it is a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have an abortion,’ and five out of six (84 percent) agreed strongly.”

The mainstream media’s obvious bias on this issue forces the prolife community to continue to spread the truth through various methods, including the RLM news, one-on-one education, letters to the editors, and e-mail updates.

Emily’s early entrance into the world is another example of why prolife people work to save women and children. Emily is an inspiration to us to outlaw partial-birth abortion in Michigan.

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