CNN's "Kentucky Couple"
On July 7, 2023, CNN ran a story titled: "Kentucky couple ‘furious’ state abortion laws meant they couldn’t hold their daughter to say goodbye." From the headline to the conclusions in the story, this particular piece exemplifies many of the methods used today in popular media to indoctrinate and propagandize, especially the majority of readers who only skim headlines. After all, only 50-70% of people even bother to click a headline before sharing it. It is accurate to define the dissemination of propaganda today as the manufacturing and design of headlines more so than actual data or content.
And this is where the CNN article-which required three authors to design-begins its perversions. As it is written, the headline implies that the state of Kentucky has a law that forbids the holding of a deceased baby. This is wrong. In actuality, the parents chose to have the child aborted outside of Kentucky, and that abortive process required tearing their unborn daughter into fragments to be extracted. There was nothing left for them to "hold."
Critical to the context of the story, the couple desired the abortion. The mother's life was not at stake. Their angst did not emerge from a desire to hold a child who did not survive birth, but stemmed from their inability to acquire an abortion in the state of Kentucky. In fact, they were so determined to abort "their daughter" that they paid cash out of pocket in a different state. The couple were also on Kentucky Medicaid, which would not pay to induce birth, nor would it cover the abortive procedures the grieving parents desired. The "medical procedure" cited in the story was a partial birth abortion. Note also that nowhere in the story is the age of the aborted child revealed, though it does say that the parents began to seek an abortion at five months of pregnancy.
The actual appeal in the story and by the parents is that abortion should have been provided to them because their daughter had a brain condition that would have resulted in her stillbirth or death shortly after birth, at least according to what they say their doctors told them.
Kentucky's abortion laws did not prevent them from holding their stillborn daughter; their shopping out-of-state to abort her disallowed them from doing so. While the story is tragic, as any loss of life is and certainly any such turmoil on parents, the facts of the story are extraordinarily different than the headline implies. The consequences derived from actions taken by the parents, not by pro-life laws in Kentucky. However, for CNN, whose agenda is consistently aligned with the eugenicist dogma of the Left, it is far more important that the story serve as emotive propaganda than an accurate portrayal of events.