Dear Colleague:
Can the rigid pro-abortion faith of the Washington Post be softening?
Post writers express second thoughts about abortion-on-demand just as a
pro-Roe Supreme Court justice is due to be replaced.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
27 October 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 42
Abortion Doubters at the Washington Post?
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
This month, the Washington Post has published no less than three bylined
opinion pieces casting grave doubt on America's policy of
abortion-on-demand. None were by the Post's conservative columnists, who
are allowed to provide ghettoized heresy regularly within certain bounds.
Incredibly, this probably temporary spate of balance concerning the
abortion issue has come as a new Supreme Court justice, who could reduce
the majority for the feminists' sacrosanct Roe v. Wade, is about to join
the court. Now that the sometimes pro-life, other times pro-choice,
sometimes anti-judicial activist, other times pro-judicial activist
Harriet Miers has been forced to withdraw from the Supreme Court
nomination process, President Bush might make a decent choice for the
court, one who will be unable to detect a right to abortion written in
invisible ink on the Constitution's 18th Century parchment.
Not only is both the fact and timing of the Post's eruption of diversity
in thought surprising, the authorship of the articles surprises as well.
A white regular columnist, a black regular columnist, and a former Post
bureau chief wrote the pieces-all pillars of the Post establishment of
various backgrounds. None of the pieces called for outlawing any
abortions, of course-diversity of thought can't be taken that far-but all
seriously questioned the morality of abortion. Prominent pro-choice Post
columnist Richard Cohen even derided the Roe decision and suggested that
it should be overturned.
Columnist Courtland Milloy inaugurated the Post's series of doubt on
October 5 in the wake of William Bennett's radio comment, "You could abort
every black baby in this country, and the crime rate would go down."
Bennett explicitly opposes this method of crime-fighting, but a brouhaha
brewed up nonetheless. Milloy pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of
Bennett's critics, while citing the appalling statistics about black
Americans' self-depopulation through abortion.
"African American women, who make up only 13% of the U.S. female
population, accounted for 32% of the 1,293,000 abortions performed in the
United States in 2002," Milloy wrote. "That's 413,760 abortions performed
on black women in one year--or 1,133 a day. (In the District [of
Columbia], half of all pregnancies ended in abortion, a higher percentage
than in any state.) No outcry over that because those were just
disposable fetuses, right? That is, until Bennett spoke of aborting
'black babies,' and suddenly those fetuses become precious pre-born black
people who must be saved from the evil Dr. Bill."
Milloy denounced black Americans' tendency to blame whites for their
problems and noted the massacre of black children being perpetrated by
their own mothers. "If the Ku Klux Klan were killing blacks the way
blacks kill blacks, we'd be up in arms," he said. He did not mention that
Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood for the purpose of reducing the
population of the racially "inferior" in the United States.
In an October 18 article, Patricia E. Bauer wrote, in a spirit of doubt,
of the natural progression toward death once the principle behind the
invented right to an abortion is adopted. "If it's unacceptable for
William Bennett to link abortion even conversationally with a whole class
of people (and, of course, it is), why then do we as a society view
abortion as justified and unremarkable in the case of another class of
people: children with disabilities?" she asked. Bauer has a daughter with
Down syndrome, a now-rare occurrence since 80-90% of unborn children with
Down syndrome are killed in the womb.
Bauer notes that most women capable of having children have so lost their
good instincts that they would have aborted her daughter. "As Margaret
bounces through life, especially out here in the land of the perfect body,
I see the way people look at her: curious, surprised, sometimes wary,
occasionally disapproving or alarmed," she wrote. "I know that most women
of childbearing age that we may encounter have judged her and her cohort,
and have found their lives to be not worth living."
Advances in the past two decades have greatly improved the quality of life
for Down syndrome sufferers, yet they continue to be eliminated. Margaret
has graduated from high school and now attends Cape Cod Community College
in Massachusetts. Those who have made up their minds-especially the most
closed-minded of all, academics-aren't interested. "At a dinner party not
long ago, I was seated next to the director of an Ivy League ethics
program," Bauer said. "In answer to another guest's question, he said he
believes that prospective parents have a moral obligation to undergo
prenatal testing and to terminate their pregnancy to avoid bringing forth
a child with a disability, because it was immoral to subject a child to
the kind of suffering he or she would have to endure. (When I started to
pipe up about our family's experience, he smiled politely and turned to
the lady on his left.)"
In an op-ed titled "Support Choice, Not Roe," Cohen tells the story of how
he unthinkingly arranged an abortion for the girlfriend of an
irresponsible friend. "I would do things a bit differently now," Cohen
mused. "I would give the matter much more thought. I no longer see
abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no
longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It
entails questions about life--maybe more so at the end of the process than
at the beginning, but life nonetheless."
Cohen goes on to criticize Roe, a preposterous and tyrannical act of
judicial supremacy over republican self-government if there ever was one.
"The very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision--the one that grounds abortion
rights in the Constitution--strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous.
Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy.," he
said.
He added: "Conservatives--and some liberals--have long argued that the
right to an abortion ought to be regulated by states. They have a point.
My guess is that the more populous states would legalize it, the smaller
ones would not, and most women would be protected. The prospect of some
women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer
me--I'm pro-choice, I repeat--but it would relieve us all from having to
defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems
more fiat than argument."
Are editors at the Post beginning to have doubts about abortion? Or are
they readying their fashionably pro-death readers for the trimming or
overturning of Roe, assuring them that a few restrictions on abortion
might be good and plenty of states will keep it legal anyway?
Most Americans don't agree with Roe. A poll, also published this month,
by Virginia Commonwealth University found that 12% of Americans want
abortion banned in all circumstances (last year, it was 17%, raising yet
another question about the accuracy of polls). Another 44% want it banned
except in "certain circumstances," and only 39% favor abortion on demand.
The Post has allowed three halting examples reflecting the culture of life
to seep into its pages, normally a bastion of the opposite. "The abortion
debate is not just about a woman's right to choose whether to have a baby;
it's also about a woman's right to choose which baby she wants to have,"
Bauer asserts in her piece about aborting disabled children.
Will that be the dominant way of being in the future, or will there be a
constructive answer to this question, as posed by Milloy: "Who is
responsible for the protection and care of this amazing uterine
environment, where the most wonderful fetal programming can occur just by
having a loving husband kiss his pregnant wife?"
Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.
_______
PRI
P.O. Box 1559
Front Royal, VA 22630
USA
Phone: (540) 622-5240 Fax: (540) 622-2728
Email: jad@pop.org
Media Contact: Joseph A. D'Agostino
(540) 622-5240, ext. 204
_________
(c) 2005 Population Research Institute. Permission to reprint granted.
Redistribute widely. Credit required.
_________
If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to PRI, please go to
https://pop.org/donate.cfm. All
donations (of any size) are welcomed and
appreciated.
_________
To subscribe to the Weekly Briefing, send an email to:
JOIN-PRI@Pluto.Sparklist.com
or email pri@pop.org and say "Add me to your
Weekly Briefing."
__________
The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human
rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending
counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of
"overpopulation."