Or more?

Two notes on how the press talks about abortion, its advocates and opponents.

First, at Get Religion, Terry Mattingly if the MSM can bring itself to call anyone "pro-life?"

Now think back to what my editor said in Denver. The people who call themselves pro-life are not really pro-life. They are the kinds of people who think human rights begin at conception and end at birth. They are pro-unborn child, but anti-woman.

So here is my question for my fellow MSM journalists. What happens if Jane Roberts (and even her husband) holds views that are not easily jammed into a perfect left-right split? What if she was and is some kind of pro-life moderate? Someone who was trying to heed all of the Catholic Church’s teachings? What if she was what some call “consistently pro-life”?

And then, in the current issue of the Notre Dame Journal of Ethics and Public Policy, Kenneth Woodward has a careful analysis of the NYTimes’ deeply-rooted and stubborn avoidance of the term "partial-birth" abortion. The article is not online, but Mr. Woodward sent me the text – it’s worth digging out if you can.

He begins by noting the difficulties of defining and naming this procedure from 1995, when it first came to public attention and Clinton vetoed a bill banning it. The difficulty is that it’s not a medical term (but then, neither is "heart attack") and that the medical community had not named it, mostly because it was a procedure not performed by reputable physicians, for the most part. It was an underground procedure. Once names were determined (Intact dilation and extraction), for example, they were too awkward for headline writers. So even though, "partial-birth" abortion was the term of choice for pro-life advocates, it became the most popular way to refer to it, in journalism, usually in scare quotes or with "what opponents call" attached to it.

But not…Woodward notes..in the NYTimes which steadfastly refused to use the term at all, even in scare quotes, even without the modifier.

From the outset, the Times determined to avoid using "partial-birth" in its news headlines. A computer search of the newspaper’s database since June of 1995 shows how persistently this prohibition has been enforced. Only once, on a news story published in April 2004, has "partial-birth" appeared in a headline. n18 Instead, the Times has employed whenever possible a selection of opaque substitutes. The most frequently used terms were "type of" abortion and "form of" abortion, abortion "method" or "procedure" or "technique," or simply a generic abortion "ban" or "curb."

There’s much more analysis of the way the Times frames this issue and what one might conclude about its intentions as a result. Woodward’s done a thorough job.

And it is true that the Times is not alone in using the evasive formulations I have described. But it is alone in using them exclusively and consistently – indeed, one might say, dogmatically. This very standardization gives their entire coverage a mono-dimensional caste and conveys a single message to its readers: the only way to understand the issue of "partial-birth" abortion is to see it as a political threat to a woman’s right to an abortion of any kind and for any reason. And the corollary message is also clear: "partial-birth" is nothing more than a metaphor, or slogan, created by one party to the nation’s on-going debate over abortion itself. In short, "partial-birth" abortion is not to be regarded as a moral and medical issue in its own right.

He concludes..

This conclusion should not surprise long-time readers of the New York Times. Nor am I under any illusion that the Times will, on this subject, rethink its one-dimensional newsroom practices, much less its constraining newsroom culture. A walk through the Times, as Okrent put it, can indeed make readers feel like "you are traveling in a strange and forbidding world." It is a strange world where "women" carry "fetuses" but where it is forbidden to ever write that "mothers" carry "babies."

This Essay is about journalistic ethics, not the ethics of abortion. My purpose throughout has been to demonstrate that even at the highest levels of journalism, the demands of craft and the demands of ethics are braided and seldom separable. Language is where the two most often intertwine, and when ideology determines what is written as news, language and its integrity are the first to suffer.

Great piece. Sorry it’s not online, but…it’s not.