On Tuesday's World News, ABC's David Wright highlighted actress Jane Russell's "botched back-alley abortion in high school," which led her to push "hard to expand adoption," but he failed to mention that she described herself as "vigorously pro-life," and that she was a conservative activist.
Wright's report aired at the end of the evening news program. The correspondent spent most of the segment on Russell's movie career, specifically her roles in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and "The Outlaw." Near the end, however, Wright noted that the actress was "also politically active," and continued with the abortion issue: "She wrote in her memoirs that a botched back-alley abortion in high school left her unable to have children. Throughout her life, she fought hard to expand adoption."
Michael Thurston of Agencee France-Presse took a similar path in his Tuesday report on the movie star, but more explicitly noted that Russell was not only pro-life, but also a conservative:
Russell described herself as vigorously pro-life, after having undergone a botched abortion at 18 that left her unable to have children. She and her first husband, American footballer Bob Waterfield, adopted three children....In famously liberal Hollywood, and despite her sex symbol image, she was a rare defender of Christian and Republican values.
In the 1950s, she founded the World Adoption International Fund to help match families with children at a time when adopting foreign children was uncommon in the United States.
"I was born to be married. A family life helps everything, and also my belief in Jesus," she told Britain's Daily Mail newspaper in a 2007 interview.
She jokingly told Christianity Today in 2009 that she could be described as "a mean-spirited right-wing conservative Christian bigot."
"I'm not bigoted about race at all, I am bigoted about those idiots that are trying to take the Ten Commandments off the wall (in courtrooms), the Bible out of school, and prayer even out of football games."
via newsbusters.org
I didn't know this about her.
