Letters submitted by BDN readers are verified by BDN Opinion Page staff. Send your letters to [email protected].
Recently, the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the Machias Valley News Observer posted daily links to a website led by state Rep. Laurel Libby of Auburn. The website, Speak Up for Life, features what I find to be typical propaganda about Gov. Janet Mills’ efforts to safeguard women’s health. The political crusade against “full-term abortion” proclaims at best an urban myth and at worst a deliberate and dangerous lie.
Libby — and by extension, the Machias Valley News Observer — is clutching her pearls about a problem that literally does not exist. Look at it this way. If you see large animal tracks, think moose or bear, not velociraptors. If you hear about the increase in California wildfires, think climate change, not Jewish space lasers. If you observe Mills trying to safeguard abortion access during the third term of pregnancy, think about a woman’s desire to save her own life or end terminal fetal suffering, not to casually murder her healthy, viable baby.
I believe the Machias Valley News Observer’s anti-abortion social media links are a betrayal of public trust, for several reasons: These posts are an affront to unbiased journalism and therefore utterly inappropriate coming from a newspaper; they are profoundly disrespectful to its diverse readership and to subscribers like me, whose patronage funds the paper’s operations; and they are corrosive to the fabric of our small community. My attempts to publish a response in the Machias Valley News Observer have been unsuccessful.
The Machias Valley News Observer’s readers deserve so much better.
Lori Day
East Machias
