Special Report - Abortion: New Rules of Engagement

Abortion: New Rules of Engagement?
June 28, 2002
by John Bloom

New York, N.Y. --I grew up around these crusty old cigar-chomping managing editors who didn't like to assign you to a story unless you despised the subject matter.

"Hey, some Irish guys are beating each other up down at the American Legion hall. You're Irish, aren't you, Kelly? Okay, you can't go! You'll just get blind drunk with all the rest of them. Who's English? They hate the Irish. Get me an Englishman!"

I haven't worked in a daily breaking-news newsroom in 17 years, but from what I've heard, all these guys have been put out to pasture and replaced by guys in starched white collars who do the opposite.

"Slave reparations press conference downtown. Get me one of those guys in the Black Journalists Association to cover it."

I don't know exactly when, how or why this change took place, but it sucks. The old idea that you send Democrats to cover Republicans, hippies to cover the Pentagon, and Christians to cover the atheist convention, has gone totally out the window. What the editors were looking for was conflict, controversy, the questioning of all assumptions. And, in fact, their ideal reporter was somebody who didn't believe in anything, except maybe the beauty of a ten-dollar Cohiba. No emotional baggage. The idea was to take on all comers, take no prisoners, rout out hypocrisy wherever you could spot it.

Which brings me to abortion, the issue that won't go away. After 35 years of arguing, you can't do a search on the word "abortion" and find even one article that doesn't have some kind of emotional baggage attached. I'm not saying such an article doesn't exist, it's just that I've never found it.

What if we made the following rule for all people who write about abortion?

If it's touched your life in any way, you can't write about it.

For example, if you've had an abortion, you can't write about the subject. (Especially if you had the abortion and decided later it was wrong. These women tend to become pro-life zealots in the same way that reformed smokers become anti-smoking fanatics.)

If you've considered an abortion but ruled it out, you can't write about it.

If you've gotten a girl pregnant and discussed abortion with her--regardless of what she finally decided--you can't write about it.

If your sister or any other family member has gone through any kind of abortion crisis, you can't write about it.

If you've marched in a pro-life parade, a pro-choice parade, or shown any kind of support for either group, you can't write about it. (This one should go without saying, but you can't assume that anymore.)

The managing editor doesn't have to pry in order to find somebody who can cover it. Just post the list of no-no's and then wait for somebody to sign up for abortion duty. Because one thing we do know about this topic--once you come down on either side of it, you tend to become doctrinaire, unchanging, and deaf to other people's points of view.

It will be argued that this is a jury too hard to select. You're going to end up handing the story to the geeky intern who still lives with his parents. Well, fine. He might listen.

It's not just political stories that are affected by the abortion debate. Increasingly we've got it seeping over into the science beat (the use of fetal tissue for research), the medical beat (New York City requiring abortion training for all doctors who train there), the religion beat (the Pope remains unmoved), crime reporting (abortion clinic bombers), and even arts coverage. (How many novels, plays and performance-art pieces hinge on an abortion sequence?)

One thing that gets lost when you have partisans covering this issue is any kind of meaningful statistic. There's not even any agreement on the number of abortions that take place each year, and yet that's a verifiable statistic that a good reporter could ferret out without accepting the figures of either side.

Then there's the whole issue that the debate hinges on--when does life begin?--and, even though the Supreme Court has already said when life legally begins--26 weeks, which they arrived at by examining the scientific evidence--it's considered unworthy of serious debate. Has anything happened in the last 29 years to indicate that the legal definition is wrong? Does life begin earlier or later than 26 weeks? These are areas of reporting that nobody looks into because all of the information sources are corrupt in one way or another.

Then there are all the stories we don't read about because they upset the apple cart in one way or another. If someone were to find a welfare mother who had 18 abortions, it would tend to go unreported because it might give ammunition to the other side or "reinforce negative stereotypes."

At the other extreme, if you were to find a single mom who had been talked into having a child and then regretted the decision for the rest of her life--let's say she was a rape victim and the face of her child reminded her of her rapist--then that's another one likely to go unreported, because it's considered too inflammatory.

Many people still remember the article from years ago, written by Dr. Richard Selzer, in which he observed a surgical abortion and recorded that he could see the fetus struggling against the needle. The man was vilified for that piece--and yet it's just the kind of clinical observation that's needed in this most divisive of debates.

Everything about abortion is raw--and I don't just mean the medical procedure. It will never be understood until a reporter, or preferably hundreds of reporters, come along and say "This is verifiable. This is not." Reporters who have no stake in the outcome.

And as it stands right now, those reporters don't have a chance in hell of being assigned to the story.

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