New York Times violates pro-choice orthodoxy

Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor of the political magazine American Prospect is upset that The New York Times doesn't include more pro-choice columns in its op-ed page. Her magazine The Prospect did an analysis of the authors published between late February 2004 and late February 2006 and found that 90 percent of the writers who sounded off on abortion were males, and that these male writers wrote 83 percent of the abortion-related articles during this time period, which means the few women who wrote about abortion for the Times wrote about it more often per capita.

This of course is Plan A of pro-abortion ideologues: framing the debate in terms of male vs female, rather than in terms which are less advantageous for them, such as reason vs emotion, rights vs generosity, power vs charity, autonomy vs responsibility etc. It's just the same old tired message, that the pro-life movement is a movement dominated by men who want to shackle the bodies of women and return to the 19th century.

The problem is, most people aren't buying that argument anymore. It's impossible to frame abortion as a battle of the sexes these days because there are just too many pro-life women out there. People were talking about this way back in 2003 and last year. To say nothing of the pro-life organizations founded and made up almost entirely of women--groups like Feminists for Life and Concerned Women of America.

Even aside from all this, the battle of the sexes argument is preposterous because it's the pro-lifers who are working to free close to 2000 women's bodies each day from being not only shackled but outright destroyed in utero.

This is one of those articles that is written in the tone of a lamentation, but because it's written by an ideological opposite, it actually gives me hope. After she's done ranting against the supposedly sexist coverage of the abortion issue on the Times op-ed page, she complains that the Times in the last two years has not included a single op-ed from anyone directly affiliated with NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, EMILY's List, the National Abortion Federation, or the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

My initial reaction to this was "yippee!" There stock has gone up considerably in my book, even though the editorial board itself is still as she describes them, "resolutely pro-choice." But at least they're not just providing a sounding board for people who agree with them and offer no reasoned arguments but merely the fumes of raw emotion. Which brought me to my second reaction: Well of course they wouldn't publish columns by these people, for the simple reason that these organizations are all completely out of touch with the American public. The vast majority of Americans are by no means supportive of abortion on demand. Even the New York Times knows this. These are the organizations that claim to be the voice of women in this country and yet as recently as August 2005 it was found that more young women in America believe abortion should be outlawed completely than believe it should be available on demand. It just goes to show how far out of the mainstream these groups have gone, not to mention Madam Franke-Ruta.

She complains later on of the long list of "right-leaning" men who for the most part decidedly leans towards pro-life. Most of them don't interest me, except for one: "Charles Chaput, the archbishop of Denver, who has written in a Bishop's Letter that 'abortion kills.'" I will never understand how people can be so repeatedly surprised when leaders of the Church take strong stances for life and against abortion. What after all do they expect?

What's more, I hardly think it is appropriate to chunk His Excellency in with everyone else as if he marches lock-step with the Republican party platform. Yes, he comes down on the conservative side in this issue. But he has spoken strongly with his brother bishops in stating that the death penalty in America needs to be abolished. The tail-and-hooves caricature may or may not work for some of these politicians (I don't know most of them so I can't say), but not for this man of God.

She goes on:

Not only has The New York Times lacked such perspectives, but the pro-choice men invited to write for its op-ed page in recent years have all too often been highly ambivalent in their support of women’s reproductive freedom.

So not only is there a shortage of women, but there is also a shortage of pro-choice men, and even among the pro-choice men, they are simply not forceful enough when it comes to this fundamental "right" of women. But again I have to ask, what is surprising about this? It makes total sense to me. After all, what Roe v Wade essentially did for men was not so much supply rights to them as it removed duties from them.

Roe, as I said last week, is the water with which men wash their hands of the unwanted pregnancy situation. When duties are removed from anyone, as a general rule, laziness sets in. Why do we think there's been such a rash of delinquent dads in the last few decades? So Madam Franke-Ruta wants to have the cake of Roe that makes men lazy, but then wants to eat it too, benefiting from the activism of the very men that Roe cuts off the hook. It just doesn't work that way.

The whole article was a laundry list of tired pro-choice rhetoric that frankly I just had to laugh at. It's an antique really. A window into the past when all the myths and misrepresentations of the pro-choice movement used to fly. Maybe someday our brothers and sisters adrift in the pro-choice movement will look at their calendars and realize it's no longer the 1970s. Men and women are starting to question the real value of "choice," and even pillars of pro-choice orthodoxy are starting to sway before the winds of life.