Science Takes Back Seat to Personal Attacks on PBS Program.(Public Broadcasting Service's news program 'NOW')

On July 20, PBS's weekly news program, NOW, examined the controversy over whether women can and do suffer serious emotional distress in the aftermath of an abortion. The PBS web page provided hyperlinks to almost as many sources that affirmed that conclusion as those which did not, leading the unwary viewer to suspect the program itself might be half-way balanced.

Such was not the case. With barely concealed hostility, NOW's Maria Hinojosa, the on-camera presence, all but got in the face of anyone who suggested there really is science to buttress the assertion that a percentage of womenprobably at least 1020%suffer severe mental and emotional problems after their abortions.

In many ways, the program was a condensed version of a cover story that appeared in the January 21, 2007, issue of the New York Times Magazine. Written by Emily Bazelton, "Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?" offered a circuitous voyage around the recent and rapidly accumulating scientific evidence that clearly shows the negative psychological consequences of abortion on women.

The article and the PBS program had something else in common: Prof. Priscilla Coleman. By agreeing to talk to each, Dr. Coleman, an expert in this field, walked into the lion's den, not once, but twice.

Hinojosa and Bazelton simply ignored the many articles Coleman provided to them with evidence establishing the connection be-tween abortion and a host of post-abortion emotional and relational difficulties that had been published in peer-reviewed journals. In both instances, the emphasis was on the work of people Hinojosa and Bazelton obviously felt could be caricatured, rather than on the science or the loving assistance offered to deeply depressed women who are trying to put their lives back together.

The NOW program was even more blatant than the New York Times Magazine piece. The notion that pro-lifers care not a twit about women's mental and physical health was not a vague subtext. It was flatly asserted.

In that vein, Hinojosa told her audience (in almost conspiratorial tones) that pro-lifers have adopted a "new strategy" that focuses on abortion's damage to women. It's bad enough that this "seismic shift" is financed by "millions" of dollars invested by pro-lifers in a "multifaceted strategy." Worse yet, according to an indignant Hinojosa, is that pro-lifers have co-opted the language of the "women's rights movement," conjured up dubious pseudo-science, and portrayed women as victims.