“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 (pictured above) 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 £90,000) for having broadcast what it called “manifestly inaccurate” information.
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 rigour in its presentation and treatment of information.”
The heavy fine and the dishonesty of the reasoning behind it are 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 recognise 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.
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.