The XX Factor

Fox News Commentator Blames Abortion for Christopher Lane Shooting

This week’s “stupidest thing said on Fox News” is especially pathetic. (Above video, via Media Matters.) Three teenagers in Oklahoma allegedly murdered an Australian student named Christopher Lane, for which they were arrested and charged with murder. The reason this is a “scandal” is because two of the teenagers were black and, as Tom Scocca at Gawker explains, racists figure it’s their turn to be angry after feeling put upon by the heavy coverage of the George Zimmerman trial. Now everyone on the right, including anti-choicers, wants a chance to voice their outrage about murder suspects who were arrested and charged with murder. Non-priest and executive director of Priests for Life Janet Morana was asked on Fox News to diagnose what caused the boys to allegedly kill. Naturally, the answer is legal abortion.

First of all, we have to start with the fact that since 1973…. These kids are survivors. They could have been aborted. And that’s a fact. And people don’t realize. They’re post-Roe v Wade, and therefore there’s a thing called “survivor syndrome.” There’s a psychiatrist up in Canada, Dr. Philip Ney, has studied this for decades and shown the effect. Just the fact that you could have been aborted can affect you as a survivor of Roe v Wade

How a person’s supposedly deep grief over embryos that didn’t make it leads him to go shoot people is never explained. Questions like, “how’s that work?” or “what about people murdered prior to 1973?” were not uttered by the Fox News host. But don’t think about any of that, viewers. Just let the bath of righteous indignation about those abortions and kids these days and blacks wash over you like a warm bath. It’s August and all you need to know is that you should be mad about something. Too many questions will spoil the magic.