What’s wrong with American news media?
What helps explain why the pastime of reading the paper with one’s morning coffee has all but gone the way of the penny? Why does it seem that the readers who remain are increasingly “very online” and walled within a separate universe from their neighbor next door?
Plenty, we know. But a piece by The New York Times editorial board this week shows just how out of touch legacy media institutions have grown with views that are truly mainstream.
The Times starts off noting that abortions have increased, not decreased, after Dobbs. Someone should tell them this “surprising outcome,” as they call it, is the result not of happenstance but deliberate strategy by the abortion lobby – starting well before Dobbs – to push dangerous mail-order abortion drugs which they claim have “transformed the practice of reproductive medicine.” (Certainly not for the better.)
With at least 1.1 million abortions happening a year – fueled by the deregulation of drugs like mifepristone – the Times frets that Republican villains have stepped in to stem this mind-boggling loss of life and the influx of severe drug complications, such as hemorrhage and sepsis, that accompany it.
As we’ve reported, a recent, large poll showed 57% of liberal voters think it’s a good idea to require a doctor visit before one can obtain drugs to cause an abortion (and they know that, no, a Zoom call or web intake form doesn’t cut it). Yet the Times provides further proof of how today’s abortion movement venerates “access” at the expense of health, freedom, and women themselves.
The Democratic talking point that abortion should be “between a woman and her doctor” hasn’t been reality on the ground since at least 2021, when the Biden administration used COVID-19 as cover to get rid of in-person doctor visits and flood the postal system with cheap abortion drugs. But at the Times, it’s dramatic the extent to which women themselves are cut out of the story.
Extolling the “clear benefits” of pro-abortion shield laws, which “help women” in states with pro-life laws “have control of their own bodies and lives,” the Times staff lounge must be thrilled by California’s efforts to hide online abortion drug dealers’ conduct in anonymity. But a glaring woman-shaped hole appears whenever pro-life states’ efforts to seek justice and restitution are discussed.
Just two days earlier, the latest preventable abortion drug horror story broke. It quickly caught political leaders’ attention – but you won’t learn about it anywhere in the New York Times.
An Ohio medical resident wasn’t authorized to prescribe mifepristone, which carries a black box warning, the FDA’s strongest label for drugs with potentially serious risks. According to the state board of medicine, that didn’t stop him from ordering abortion drugs online from an out-of-state seller, fraudulently using his estranged wife’s personal information (paid for with his own credit card), and force-feeding them to his pregnant girlfriend. He was stripped of his license but has yet to be charged. His romantic partner says she now has a restraining order.
Women harmed by abortion (or, conversely, happy after rejecting abortion) haunt The New York Times like ghosts – their existence never acknowledged and their voices never heard.
When Louisiana made it a crime to poison women with abortion drugs, pro-abortion politicians who call themselves defenders of women’s rights framed it as an attack on “access.” They ignored Catherine, the woman at the heart of the case, who has gone through more than most of us can imagine. Watch Catherine bravely explain how her ex-husband – now in prison for breaking probation – repeatedly tried to kill their unborn daughter:
Rosalie wanted to keep her baby, but her boyfriend didn’t give her that option, pushing her to take drugs he ordered. Now she and the State of Louisiana are suing the FDA.
In her own words: “If mail-order abortion wasn’t a thing, I’m 100% sure I would have my child.”
Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, both from Georgia, unfortunately cannot speak for themselves. They both died after experiencing complications from taking legally obtained abortion drugs – a fact the Times brushes off. Instead of calling out malpractice or questioning the pro-abortion dogma that deadly drugs are “safer than Tylenol,” they blame Dobbs for causing “burdens and tragedies.”
Do these “burdens and tragedies” include…thriving children? Neesha, also a Georgia woman, shares what a much happier ending looks like after choosing life for her son, with the encouragement of pro-life laws:
Fearing that common sense might break out, the Times pushes for Congress to pass a national law forcing abortion on every state. Curiously, they want us to believe this would simply look like European-style laws that mostly limit abortion after the first trimester.
How bad do they think our memories are? In 2022 when U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham proposed a national limit that was more liberal than 94% of Europe, designed to protect babies at a point when credible science shows they feel excruciating pain, NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg vilified it as “unbelievably cruel.”
The mandate the Democrats want to pass looks nothing like Europe – it looks like the laws of Communist China and Vietnam. It is the so-called Women’s Health Protect Act, a recent version of which barely mentioned women at all. It would drag every state in the country down to the level of nine states and D.C. that have no gestational limits whatsoever for abortion.
A few bold readers pushed back in the comment section. At the Times, they’re the minority report, but in America at large they are normal. They deserve to be heard, too, with minimal added commentary from us:
A safety issue
“It kills people”
This self-described pro-choice reader had a few interesting points:
“An unbelievably horrific experience”
Even when abortion drugs are used exactly as directed by the FDA, they send an estimated 1 in 25 women to the emergency room. The editors don’t dispute these stats from the FDA, but the closest they come to conceding this is to say they’re “not for everyone…some women do not want to deal with the pain and bleeding the pills cause.” This reader didn’t entirely elaborate, but we’re guessing it was painful:
Malpractice, not pro-life laws
Extreme focus on abortion “insulting”
Not everyone who’s disturbed by the paper’s harping on the alleged need for abortion is to the right of Bernie Sanders, from the sound of it:
Former Democrats: A growing category
“A deep feeling that what we had done was wrong”
This one was terribly sad, though not as sad as some of the dismissive replies it got:
Like the penny, vestiges of the abortion movement’s old slogans may hang on for a while in the culture of any rank-and-file who actually believed them. At the Times, where a handful of the most elite opinionators in the business block, redact and delete the real women behind false pro-abortion narratives, they’re already lost in the endless present of the party line. But such delusion can’t continue forever without exacting a hard cost.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.