It can’t be both depending on how we feel
by Stephen Kneale, Building Jerusalem:
Last week, I saw the sad news that Kate and Rio Ferdinand had lost their unborn baby. It doesn’t matter who you are, such things are always an absolute tragedy.
I was surprised by two things in the article. First, and the less, but nonetheless still, surprising thing was that this hit the news at all. That isn’t to diminish it, just to say I don’t tend to expect national newspapers to bother running these sorts of stories. Certainly not the kind of broadsheet I happened to read it in. I was surprised it was deemed especially newsworthy for most people.
But the much more surprising thing was the headline and nature of the content. The headline was very clear: Kate Ferdinand announces loss of her and husband Rio’s unborn baby. The content was even clearer still. It referred to them as having ‘lost their unborn child’ and reported that it was announced because ‘our baby had no heartbeat in our 12 week scan and I had to have surgery.’ I was surprised because their baby was referred to clearly as a baby and an unborn child despite only being 12-weeks old.
This is notable because we are continually told that babies of such an age are merely ‘clumps of cells’. They are usually referred to exclusively as foetuses. They are rarely referred to as babies or children. Yet here, at a mere 12-week scan, it is seen as appropriate to report that this was the loss of an unborn child, a real baby. Certainly that is how the Ferdinand’s view matters and it is what the newspaper affirms.
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