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Note to the NYT: We’re On To You

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When I picked up the New York Times last weekend, I thumbed through the sections, skimming the headlines and plotting out my reading plan. That is, until I came upon the magazine and its featured article, “The First Ache,” an exploration of fetal pain. Ick, I thought. Yet another Times article “exploring” the complications in the quote-unquote abortion debate. I didn’t feel much better having read the article — it’s misleading and unbalanced.

But as Debbie Nathan points out in the New Republic (via), this shouldn’t be surprising coming from the Times. She writes:

What is The New York Times’ problem with abortion? The editorial page consistently supports sex education, birth control, and the right to legally end unwanted pregnancy. The rest of the Times, however, often seems uncomfortable with concrete applications of these principles. Not a season goes by that a news item or magazine feature doesn’t imply that women who get abortions are acting with egotism, unhealthiness, and cruelty.

There’s last week’s article by Annie Murphy Paul; last year, the usually wonderful Emily Bazelon wrote an article for the Magazine about so-called Post Abortion Syndrome. As Nathan points out on TNR, though, Bazelon’s article, while explaining the evidence that “PAS” doesn’t exist, features all these fuzzy profiles of “PAS” sufferers and treads lightly over the “syndrome’s” political uses (and, I would argue, political creation). There’s more (which Nathan is sure to document). And I’ve complained before about other things the Times has published about abortion and other issues related to feminism, gender, and sexuality.

Which all leads to the question: what gives NY Times? By your own admission, your editorial page strongly supports abortion rights. So why all the apologizing for it and the mixed signals? Nathan posits that the Times’s coverage mirrors a societal trend:

Liberals and even feminists have bought into the reasoning that abortion is basically immoral, and if women could just be educated and dosed with birth control, we wouldn’t have to terminate any pregnancies. Bill Clinton’s famous formulation [ed. note – which Hillary Clinton has adopted], that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” has become conventional wisdom.

It’s a shame that the paper of record, the Gray Lady herself, is not above such moralizing about an issue on which women face more than enough moralizing as it is.

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