Remember Tonya Reaves, the woman who died in 2012 from a botched abortion in a downtown Chicago Planned Parenthood Clinic?
It has taken several years, but her family finally got justice when Planned Parenthood, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation agreed to pay $2 million in a wrong death settlement to Ms. Reaves surviving son.
Tonya Reaves
Funny thing, though. While Ms. Reaves death did receive some notice when it happened, the settlement award has received none that I can find among the mainstream media.
It was on July 20, 2011 that the 24-year-old died after a late-term abortion at Planned Parenthood’s Loop Health Center from uncontrolled bleeding. According to reports, the center delayed for more than five hours to transport Ms. Reaves to the hospital, where she reported faced additional delays.
Let me say it again: She was left to bleed for more than five hours at the clinic.
As the Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm noted in a statement:
After the botched abortion took place, Tonya Reaves was left to bleed for five and a half hours in the Planned Parenthood clinic without medical treatment. Furthermore, when Ms. Reaves was finally transferred to the hospital, it took several more hours for her to be treated properly, which indicates that Planned Parenthood did not provide the hospital with sufficient information regarding Ms. Reaves’ condition. The autopsy after her death revealed that Ms. Reaves had suffered perforation of the uterus.
This is either craven indifference or, at best, appalling incompetence.
So, here’s the deal: The abortion industry–it’s leading practitioner being Planned Parenthood–regularly insists that abortion is completely safe, that we need a virtually unregulated industry (like we have in Illinois) because without it we would have to return to the days of (unregulated) “back-alley” abortions.
Having been a member of the mainstream media for almost my entire professional life, I’m at a total loss to understand why this story has received no mention–none that I can find–in the mainstream or Chicago media. Critics of the mainstream media routinely charge that such omissions (and other sins of commission) are the result of a left-leaning media bias.
I want to resist the kind of thinking that ascribes such a widespread bias to an entire profession. But I’m hard put to come up with another reason for the media’s failure to take notice of this important story. Until I see otherwise, I guess I just have to agree with the observation is that the media have intentionally ignored the story because it deviates from their preferred narrative.
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