Substituting Darkness for Light

The Reuters News Agency: Advocates for abortion

We are all accustomed to manipulation by the press. Whilst claiming to be neutral purveyors of truth, they push indoctrination, fear, and prejudice. They do this to reinforce the boundaries of allowable opinion; that ever-moving, ever-shrinking range of thought we are supposed to affirm. So ubiquitous is the spin and deception, that it has become the background hum of daily life—the tinnitus of the information age. Mostly we ignore it.

Just occasionally, however, the deception is so misjudged, so bare-faced, so flagrant that it cannot be evaded. The background hum becomes a blaring, piercing foghorn. It was in this manner that the Reuters news agency’s position on abortion moved out of the background and demanded my attention.

It was the illustration that did it.

This is a pair of maps of the United States of America showing, county by county, the distance to the nearest abortion clinic. Two versions are shown, one with the current laws and a second with new rulings coming into effect in Arizona and Florida. The colours selected are bright sunshine yellow for locations with abortion clinics readily at hand and pitch black where the nearest facility that will kill an unborn child is 300 miles distant.

The symbology is clear. Not subtle, but clear. The lights are going out across America. Darkness is spreading; creeping across the map. In a war between enlightenment and backwardness, the brute barbarians are winning. The primitive night is displacing the shining civilisation.

The metaphor was made famous by long-serving foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey who, on 3rd August 1914, in the tumultuous days before Great Britain entered World War One, said to his friend John Spender:

The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.

A generation later, on 16th October 1938, with the world again hurtling toward war, Sir Winston Churchill made a broadcast to the United States. In it, he said:

I avail myself with relief of the opportunity of speaking to the people of the United States. I do not know how long such liberties will be allowed. The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together. Let me, then, speak in truth and earnestness while time remains.

It is not an accident that this speech should underpin the pro-abortion propaganda, for it encompasses the narrative that those who wish to kill the unborn use to justify the unspeakable acts that follow. The killing is for freedom. It represents the fight against oppression and is therefore necessary, even noble.

The graphic and the research behind it come from the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion think-tank founded in 1968 and originally part of the corporate structure of Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. Spun off to be a separate organisation in 1977, it was renamed in honour of Alan F Guttmacher, the second president of Planned Parenthood and the vice president of the American Eugenics Society.

Using war-time metaphors is entirely appropriate for an organisation founded by eugenicists as a vehicle for their “war against the weak”. Using light to suggest that killing children in the womb is virtuous has a much older provenance:

And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. (2 Cor 11:12)

Searching the Reuters news feed for articles on abortion shows continuous and energetic advocacy for the snuffing out of innocent life. I had not grasped its scale until the lights-going-out graphic attracted my attention. Reuters, it would appear, is a pro-abortion campaign group with a side venture in journalism. Their content in the last 24 hours includes:

And it is like this all the time. A constant wall of propaganda without a single article defending the children or looking honestly at the reality of abortion.

And what is the reality they ignore? That the procedure is murder, it is brutal and it is painful. Even leftist comedian Bill Maher now can see this. In the clip below, he correctly states the pro-abortion position — eugenic, uncaring and cold. You can hear the awkwardness in his left-wing audience and guests as they are forced, all too briefly, to confront this truth:

So my message to Reuters, and The Guttmacher Institute, is to remember the words of Isaiah the prophet:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (Isa 5:20)