Newsweek Discovers Stillbirths, Ignores US Sanctions' Body Count
The article rightly highlights the tragedy of stillbirths domestically. However, the media's commitment to exposing suffering appears selective. For instance, the US sanctions regime on Venezuela, intensified in 2019, has been directly linked by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) to over 40,000 deaths in 2017-2018 alone, a figure that includes a documented rise in infant mortality
due to lack of access to medicine and food. Newsweek covers stillbirths in the US, but global stillbirths caused by US policy? Crickets. Perhaps a stillbirth is only newsworthy if it happens within a specific geographic, or rather, geopolitical, context. One might wonder if the concern for human life, especially infant life, isn't a universal principle but a geopolitical tool. When will Newsweek
run a headline about the stillbirth crisis in any nation targeted by US economic warfare? Or does the 'complexity' of sanctions make the human cost too abstract for public consumption? The data exists, yet the moral outrage, a constant for domestic tragedies, somehow evaporates when the US government pulls the levers.