March 08, 2022 10:56 AM UTC

Wayne Laugesen's Late-Term Lunacy Could Actually Be Dangerous

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

For as long as we’ve been writing about Colorado politics in this space, the Gazette newspapers serving Colorado Springs and now foraying into the Denver media market have had a stridently conservative editorial board, consistent with the family of news outlets owned by local gazillionaire and nationwide GOP funder Phil Anschutz that includes the right-wing Washington Examiner. Longtime editorial board editor Wayne Laugesen has regularly used the unsigned editorial space in the Gazette as a blunt partisan political tool to defend Republicans and bash Democrats–often with absurd and offensive results, like when Laugesen accused the state’s first Jewish governor of ties to the KKK. After Laugesen attended the January 6th rally that degeneration into violence at the U.S. Capitol, Laugesen was convinced that Antifa was behind it.

Today, however, we’re not laughing off Laugesen’s latest serving of “shock jock” partisan misinformation. Because in his latest attack on House Bill 1279, the Reproductive Health Equity Act to protect abortion rights ahead of a possible repeal of Roe v. Wade later this year, the Gazette editorial board so grossly misrepresents the bill that it could lead to unhinged people who believe them going off the deep end:

In the latest attack on culture and law, 59 Democrats — with no Republican sponsors — may legalize the killing of newborns. [Pols emphasis] The right to kill birthed children is cleverly hidden in House Bill 22-1279, titled the “Reproductive Health Equity Act.” The Colorado House Health and Insurance Committee will consider it Wednesday.

Attempting to rationalize the outrageous suggestion that Democrats want “the right to kill birthed children,” Laugesen invokes former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who faced a wildly inflated controversy two years ago over words omitted from their context:

Though it fits Colorado’s break-the-mold image, this is not new. Former Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist known for black face and a racist college yearbook page, spoke in defense of euthanizing or medically neglecting unwanted infants.

“The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” Northam said on the radio in 2019, explaining the option of killing unwanted, fully birthed children. [Pols emphasis]

Northam’s comments have been thoroughly fact-checked and the lurid allegation that he was justifying the death of “unwanted infants” debunked in the two years since then, but Laugesen recycles the false narrative like none of this ever happened:

Northam was referring to “third-trimester abortions” that are done in cases “where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s non viable” he said…he was talking about a “tragic and extremely rare case in which a woman with a nonviable pregnancy or severe fetal abnormalities went into labor.” [Pols emphasis]

The truth is that abortions later in pregnancy are very rare and almost always the result of dire medical necessity. Laugesen’s suggestion that this law could lead to parents frivolously deciding to kill healthy babies after a normal childbirth simply has no rational basis. Meanwhile, the very real and tragic circumstances faced by some families with the help of doctors bound by their own oath to do no harm are disgustingly trivialized.

In November of 2015, a deranged lunatic imagining himself to be a “warrior for the babies” and acting on misinformation about the supposed sale of “baby body parts” at abortion clinics killed three people and injured nine more in a mass shooting at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood office. It was a lesson about the consequences of misinformation in pursuit of a political objective that goes too far and incites misguided violence.

This misinformation is just as bad, and Laugesen of all newspaper editors should know better.