“In 2022, 234,300 abortions were registered in France. According to the Worldometer Institute, abortion is also the leading cause of death in the world: 73 million in 2022, i.e. 52 percent of all deaths.”
These words, spoken by Catholic journalist Aymeric Pourbaix on February 25 on his televised program En quête d’esprit (“The quest for the spirit”) on the CNews TV channel, were punished on November 13 when ARCOM, the independent public regulatory authority for audiovisual and digital communications, ordered the private channel to pay a 100,000 euro fine (roughly $105,000 US ) for having broadcast “manifestly inaccurate” information, as LifeSiteNews has reported.
Remarkably, ARCOM did not take into account the fact that the political debate over the enshrinement of abortion rights in the French constitution was in full swing when Pourbaix of CNews presented Worldometer’s statistics.
The heavy fine is symptomatic of the abortion “taboo” that prevents any kind of meaningful debate over abortion in France and that led to declaring access to “voluntary interruption of pregnancy” a constitutional right earlier this year.
The fine illustrates the injustice of French laws that refuse to recognize the unborn as human beings. Mere days before, humorist and comedian Pierre Palmade had been given a five-year prison sentence for having seriously injured three members of a family in February of last year while driving under the influence of cocaine. Despite the survivors’ efforts, he was not indicted for having caused the death of the unborn child of the then 6-months-pregnant victim, because “fetuses” do not have a juridical status as persons in French law.
Interestingly, public opinion was horrified that Palmade could not be sentenced for the death of a viable unborn baby.
CNews was fined for having committed the unthinkable by equating the induced death of an unborn child in his or her mother’s womb to the death of any other human being. ARCOM’s decision stated that the station had broadcast a “manifest inaccuracy” which “was not contradicted by any of the other people present on set” when it presented abortion as “the leading cause of death in the world” ahead of cancer and tobacco.
“Part of the sequence in question equates abortion with a cause of death and, as a consequence, it equates an embryo or fetus that could not be born alive because of an abortion with a deceased person, even though in law they are not considered persons. Abortion cannot therefore be presented as a cause of mortality. (…) This source [Worldometer] merely states that, according to the World Health Organization, 73 million abortions are induced worldwide every year,” reads ARCOM’s decision. It states also that the channel violated its “obligation of honesty and rigor in its presentation and treatment of information.”
In condemning it, ARCOM endorsed the uproar that hailed CNews’ breaking of the abortion taboo, about which more later. First the ruling’s inconsistencies and deception deserve to be brought to light.
If “an embryo or fetus (…) could not be born alive,” this can only be because he or she died before he or she was born, and he or she could not have died if her or she had not previously been alive.
In a country like China, which made extensive use of abortion, particularly forced abortion, as part of its one-child policy from 1971 to 2016 (and now employing a three-child policy), the Communist government itself officially estimates that 400 million births have been “avoided.” Officially, between 1971 and 2011, 336 million abortions were performed by Chinese doctors. How can you fail to correlate these two statistics? Hundreds of millions of human beings in gestation were not born because they had ceased to live – which means they had died.
As mentioned above, French case law does not recognize that unborn children have personal rights. At the same time, however, the French Civil Code provides that “all those born or conceived at the time of the opening of a succession are capable of inheriting” (unless the child is stillborn… and therefore indeed “dead” before birth).
Because abortion is legal in France – one might even say that it is aggressively so – legislators and judges will contort themselves in order to explain away the fact that an unborn child has full rights as an heir while growing in its mother’s womb while at the same time not having juridical status as a person with legal capacity.
Other countries, on the other hand, grant strong protection or a form of recognition to the unborn child because of its identity as a human being in its own right: this was previously the case in Ireland, where the conceived child’s “right to be born” was recognized. It is still the case in Australia when a woman loses her unborn child in a road accident, for example. Many American states now protect the life of the unborn child and prohibit abortion almost entirely in the name of the conceived child’s status as a human being. In these countries and states, abortion is considered as a cause of death. And, therefore, when talking about global mortality, from a global point of view, it should be at least possible to discuss the issue.
As for the figures presented by “Worldometer,” it is no coincidence that they are included in the section of the site that details health data. This presents 11 causes of death (infectious disease, influenza, maternal and infant mortality, AIDS, cancer, malaria, smoking, alcoholism, suicide, road accidents), to which are only added statistics on HIV infections, the number of cigarettes smoked per day and spending on drugs. There is nothing else, apart from the abortion count. What else can the section be than a mortality chart, since it exclusively presents causes of death and behavior that makes death more probable?
Clearly, ARCOM has taken it onto itself the responsibility to protect an official “truth:” “Abortion does not kill a human being.” It is a diktat or compulsory thought that no argument, no statistic, and no analysis can or may contradict – at least not on a TV channel that is officially licensed to transmit its shows on the national digital television network TNT.
When CNews broke the taboo last February, multiple media outlets struck out at the TV channel. It was presented as being “in the bosom of ultra-conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré,” a successful Catholic businessman who has taken control of a number of print and broadcast media in France.
In the French mainstream media, billionaires are only acceptable when they are pro-abortion, pro-contraception, and pro-“reproductive rights.” The legacy media will never disparage Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, Ted Turner and other super-rich promoters of population control, whose effectiveness is in direct proportion to their fabulous wealth.
Sadly, several of CNews’ star anchors immediately presented their “apologies” for the infographic Aymeric Pourbaix presented. Laurence Ferrari, a mainstream media journalist, was the first to mention on X that it was “error that should not have occurred.”
“It is absolutely impossible to compare these figures [on abortion] and to mirror them with mortality numbers linked to cancer or smoking,” Ferrari declared the day after her colleague Aymeric Pourbaix’s show. She asserted that “calling into question” the “right” to abortion was unthinkable. She also expressed her support for those “around the world (…) who are fighting to obtain the right to control their own bodies, and for those who have lost their lives because they were unable to access abortion.”
Another star presenter, Sonia Mabrouk, who publicly upholds France’s “Christian spiritual roots” and who authored a book titled Reconquering the Sacred: the Survival of the West depends on the Sacred, was also quick to distance herself from her colleague’s “controversial” remarks. Supposedly right-wing and Christian anchor Christine Kelly also presented apologies.
Citing a “technical error” in an attempt to exonerate the channel, Gérald-Brice Viret, CEO of Canal+, the parent company of CNews, said that the sequence “had precisely been removed during final editing and should therefore never have been broadcast.”
Vincent Bolloré did not comment on the incident.
Four representatives of his media outlet, including Ferrari and Mabrouk, were heard in a scheduled audition by the French National Assembly’s investigative committee regarding the renewal of CNews digital television network approval, four days after the incident. The audition took place on February 29 and gave rise to questions about the abortion statistics on the part of the legislators. The CNews panel groveled, using words such as “vile,” “unpardonable,” “unacceptable,” “traumatic,” “unspeakable,” “dramatic and catastrophic,” “a disgrace for us all.”
None of this softened ARCOM’s approach.
CNews also failed to stand up for itself, especially when it came to the accusation that Worldometer’s statistics had been used improperly.
ARCOM’s November 13 ruling made clear that, it its view, “the publisher’s allegations that an error led to the broadcast of the wrong version of the sequence have no bearing on the characterization of the breach.”
Many public figures, including the president of the extreme left “La France insoumise” party, Mathilde Panot, had beseiged the regulatory body with complaints. “As a reminder, the offense of obstructing abortion is punishable by law in France,” Panot said, accusing CNews of moving “ever further towards the despicable.”
The deputy health minister at the time, Frédéric Valletoux, called Pourbaix’s comments “outrageous.” “More than ever, Emmanuel Macron’s commitment to enshrine abortion in the Constitution is an essential step forward,” Valletoux stated.
In view of all this, it is hard to believe that, despite the growing audience for En quête d’esprit, the numbers it cited and the mention of abortion as a cause of mortality could have had the slightest impact on the goals of the French abortion lobby. But the latter will not tolerate even the slightest challenge. Like a steam roller or an armored tank, it crushes all opposition, however puny. The media have been warned: if they go against the officialized culture of death, there will be hell to pay.
