Media Consistently Misses Decline in Number of Abortions.

It goes without saying that abortion is one of the most scrutinized issues in American politics. The mainstream media is always eager to detail the positions of various candidates, document platform fights, and analyze the views of prospective Supreme Court nominees. However, despite this, the media has only granted scant coverage to the consistent decline in the number of abortions since the early 1990s.

Have you read much, or anything, about how the number of abortions peaked at 1.6 million in 1990 but is now slightly under 1.3 million abortions? Have you read anything about the impact of commonsense state legislation which, studies show, has reduced the number of abortions?

The only occasions when the media has used (or, in some cases, abused) these numbers has been to advance pro-abortion political objectives. The coverage by the New York Times provides a good example.

The Times ran brief stories on declining abortion figures in both 1996 and 1997. However, between 1998 and 2004, the Times was virtually silent on the topic. Interestingly, the only occasions where the Times referenced declining abortion figures were during sympathetic articles about the approval of the abortifacient RU486 and the increased amenities that abortion clinics were offering women to increase business.

However, during the 2004 presidential election, abortion trends suddenly became a hot topic. This was partly because several commentators were using the Clinton-era decline to urge pro-life voters to support candidates who supported abortion.

A New York Times op-ed by Mark Rochethe dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Damemade this exact point. Roche contrasted the slight increase in abortions that occurred under the Reagan administration with the decline during Bill Clinton's presidency to argue counter-intuitively that the interests of abortion opponents might be better served by electing a President who supported legalized abortion.

Perhaps even more notoriously, ethicist Glen Stassen wrote a widely circulated article for the magazine Sojourners, arguing that abortions had actually increased since President Bush's inauguration. This article was published by a number of major newspapers around the country, including the Charlotte Observer, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, and Hartford Courant. Furthermore, Stassen's research was cited in articles that appeared in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.