Book 2 - Ebu

Guidelines on gender-ethical reporting
Santorum’s interview with the “CaffeinatedThoughts.com” website has aroused the
condemnation of commentators such as Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller, who described
Santorum’s comments as “the surprise of October”; in his opinion, these comments have
not been accidental.
In turn, columnist Michael Scherer from Time magazine pointed out that only 8% of
voters believe that the use of contraception is “immoral”, questioning what Santorum
seeks to gain with his statements.
[…]
This former senator from the state of Pennsylvania has promised that if he wins the
presidency on November 6th, he will ban gay marriage and seek to revert the Supreme
Court decision of 1973 that legalized abortion in the United States.
Analysis
This news story is a wire from an international agency but has been handled and
reproduced without consideration for the effect that the statements made by the
subject of the article (Santorum) could have on women’s lives particularly in the
country in which it is published. The story does not offer information regarding
existing public policy on contraception in the United States, nor does it inform
readers about men’s responsibility in pregnancy prevention, nor does it even offer the
perspective of female politicians regarding a topic that is critical for women, who are
half of the American population.
In order to address this story comprehensively, the agency could have included the
number of teenage pregnancies or maternal deaths, the current situation of voluntary
interruption of pregnancies, policy differences from state to state, and access, among
other issues.
The article fails to include the voices of other religions and their views on sexual and
reproductive life, limiting its perspective to a smaller percentage of the population
in a country where Catholics do not even constitute the majority. The news agency
could have addressed the effects of not using contraception and its impact upon
vulnerable women, using statistics from neighbouring countries, such as Mexico,
where interruption of pregnancy is only legal in the Federal District.
Economic data about the cost of contraception, the cost of subsidies to large families
living in poverty and government policy in this field would further put this debate in
perspective, as well as including other positions.
Further, since this article is published on an Internet news website in Paraguay, it
would have been important to contextualize the story by evoking the local situation
and providing useful information to understand, for instance, how the debate may
impact countries in which access to contraception is still under discussion. This
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