(Texas Scorecard) – The legacy media can’t help but make itself look foolish as it lurches toward its increasing irrelevance.
Recently, 60 Minutes did a feature on abortion policies in Texas, hoping to make a case that abortion laws are scaring doctors and jeopardizing the well-being of pregnant women in Texas.
To make its point, CBS enlisted the help of a doctor from New Mexico and a handful of physicians interested in scoring political points at the cost of misleading Texas women.
Dr. Eve Espey claimed that residents in Texas “lack an opportunity to learn trauma-informed care, diagnosing pregnancy complications in the first trimester and in the second trimester. They miss learning miscarriage care, ectopic pregnancy care, pregnancy of unknown location.”
Unfortunately for Espey’s and 60 Minutes’ credibility, none of that is true.
The organization Secular Pro-life posted this specific portion of the 60 Minutes segment to its Instagram account and pointed out that the blocks and rotations residents receive at UT Southwestern include Obstetrics and Gynecology Emergency Services (OGES), Obstetrics, and Maternal-Fetal Medicine.
Within the OGES rotation, residents are treating women “presenting with gynecologic complaints or obstetrics issues before 20 weeks’ gestation.”
On an annual basis, more than 20,000 patients are treated in this rotation, offering residents exposure to a wide range of conditions, including “ovarian torsion, ruptured ectopic pregnancy, pelvic infections, and medical complications of early pregnancy.”
During their Family Planning rotations, residents learn “miscarriage management using medication, office manual aspiration, and procedural management in the operating room.” That last part refers to D&C, a procedure that clears the uterus of organic material that can cause a deadly infection after a miscarriage or birth.
Everything Espey said was a lie, and likely a motivated one. According to her faculty page at the University of New Mexico, where she works as an abortionist, Dr. Espey “won the Margaret Sanger Award, 50th anniversary of Planned Parenthood of Rocky Mountains” in 2014.
She’s an abortion all-star.
This non-disclosed—but completely believable—bias, paired with her inaccurate portrayal of Texas medical training, undermines her further claims that women dealing with miscarriages are leaving Texas for healthcare.
The level of conscious disregard on the part of 60 Minutes and its lineup of lab-coat liars boggles the mind.
Cases of miscarriages being confused with, and treated like, abortions by medical professionals in the state aren’t in evidence.
Suggestions made by doctors on the program that if a mother’s life is in danger, doctors are conflicted about what they can do, are inaccurate at best and intentionally misleading at worst.
Included in the segment was the false claim that mortality rates skyrocketed in Texas after its abortion ban was implemented. The 2019 stat cited by CBS is the same one NBC got wrong. Texas’ abortion ban did not go into effect until 2021.
That 60 Minutes didn’t bother to fact-check the claims is on-brand.
Many will remember “Rather-gate” from 2004, when 60 Minutes aired a segment questioning President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. Dan Rather relied on forged documents in that segment, which led to his stepping down as anchor of CBS Evening News in disgrace.
Why should we be surprised by the legacy media misleading viewers in service of a pro-abortion agenda in 2024? It’s been playing this game for a long time. But now, the media includes everyone, and social media platforms and podcast services are taking down fake news faster than the 60 Minutes equivalents of the world are producing it.
To its credit—and undermining abortion advocates’ overwrought claims that doctors live in a constant state of fear in Texas over the abortion ban—60 Minutes did note that no physician in Texas has been prosecuted for violating the state’s ban since its inception.
One of the doctors featured in the segment stated that “inconsistencies, misunderstanding, and confusion” would cause women to lose their lives.
She claimed the law would be to blame—but it’s more likely that misleading activist reporting featuring crackpot abortionists will be to blame.