The New York Times’ Consistently Deceptive Reporting on Abortion

I suspect the New York Times does not see the bias in the headline of Kate Zernike’s latest news-page foray into abortion politics: “Late Abortions Rarely Happen, but They Still Dominate Politics.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 0.9 percent of abortions take place after 21 weeks. Combine that with the Guttmacher Institute’s estimate of the total number of abortions — 1,037,000 — and it yields about 9,300 abortions after 21 weeks.

Whether that’s “rare” is a judgment call. Last year, the country saw 23 school-shooting deaths. The Times could run the headline, “School Shooting Deaths Rarely Happen, but They Still Dominate Gun Politics.” How likely is it, do you think, that it will do so?

The line from Democrats and much of the press has long been that abortions late in pregnancy are rare, that they are always or almost always done because of severe fetal abnormalities, and that it is a smear to claim that Democrats support keeping them legal regardless of the reason. (I looked at how the Times passed off these arguments as the truth in 2019 and 2020, for example.) Zernike’s article advances some of these claims while shifting the goalposts on others.

She outsources the defense of the Democrats to PolitiFact, which is happy to oblige on this topic. She writes:

Republicans and groups that oppose abortion rights argue that Democrats are pushing abortions “for any reason” in the seventh, eighth and ninth month of pregnancy, even after birth. “Jon Tester supports aborting a healthy, full-term baby the day before it’s due,” Tim Sheehy, the Republican challenger for Senate in Montana says, falsely, on his campaign website.

The linked PolitiFact article does not even consider the most relevant vote: Tester’s “no” on a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks with exceptions for pregnancies that threaten a mother’s life or result from rape or incest. At no point in that debate did the Democrats suggest that setting a later cutoff or adding more exceptions would have won their support. The Democratic platform, meanwhile, says nothing about restricting abortions late in pregnancy: It just endorses a right to abortion.

The key passage in Zernike’s article is this one:

There is no evidence that abortions are happening right up until birth, much less after — at that stage, doctors say it is a delivery of a live child, and infanticide, which is illegal everywhere. It’s also true, as anti-abortion activists say, that not all later abortions are in cases of medical emergencies or fetal abnormalities. But there’s also no evidence to support their charge that these cases happen regularly, with women aborting healthy but inconvenient pregnancies.

On the first sentence, I’d refer Zernike to several paragraphs later in her own article, when she links to papers by Dr. Warren Hern that mention abortions that took place in weeks 38 and 39. The second sentence gives away the store: Finally, the Times admits what its own reporters have done their best to deny for years. The third sentence then tries to obscure the concession. The claim pro-lifers have made is that these abortions happen and that Democrats and pro-choice laws ensure that they keep happening. Whether they happen “regularly” just returns us to the mire of subjectivity that comes along with “rare.”

Then we get the standard terminological shuffle:

A fetus is “at term,” meaning it can survive on its own without intervention, at 37 weeks. And “late-term” refers to pregnancies that go beyond the usual 40 weeks — meaning that “late-term abortions” do not happen.

The “do not happen” link goes to a language guide produced by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which has long been a politically savvy advocate of expansive abortion rights. The guide is transparently designed to bias the debate in the group’s direction. The fact is that nobody blinked at the term “late-term abortion” until activists decided it would be easier to defend the thing without the word. Here it is in 1998 in the Journal of the American Medical Association; here it is in a slew of abortionists’ websites, including that of Dr. Hern himself; here it is in tweets from several heavy hitters in the abortion lobby. The ground being fought over is absurdly narrow: No sane person believes that whether we call it “late-term abortion” or “abortion later in pregnancy” has any bearing on the moral or policy questions surrounding it. This is just a way for one side of the debate to get to call the other side dumb, with the connivance of the Times.

Zernike takes another swipe at those supposedly dumb pro-lifers: The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, she writes, “misquoted” papers by Dr. Hern, saying he estimated that a low percentage of abortions he had done later in pregnancy were for medical reasons when he was actually estimating the percentage for all abortions he had done, including early ones. CLI misquoted nothing. One Hern paper included earlier abortions, and CLI noted it. The other concerned abortions after gestations of 18 through 38 weeks, with a median of 24. CLI’s accurate note on that one: “Of these late-term abortions, just over a fifth were performed because of a poor prenatal diagnosis.”

A 2023 Atlantic profile of Hern reported the following:

Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses.

Pro-lifers have taken to quoting that deviation from the standard pro-choice line. Zernike tries to clean it up: “In an interview, Dr. Hern said that the abortions he does after 28 weeks are for serious fetal anomalies or because the woman’s life is at risk.” But a passage of that 2023 profile puts this comment in context:

“So if a pregnant woman with no health issues comes to the clinic, say, at 30 weeks, what would you do?” I asked Hern once. The question irked him. “Every pregnancy is a health issue!” he said. “There’s a certifiable risk of death from being pregnant, period.”

In 1997, commenting on a proposed ban on abortions later in pregnancy, Hern said, “I will certify that any pregnancy is a threat to a woman’s life and could cause grievous injury to her physical health.”

According to Zernike, pro-lifers have also misunderstood the work of two researchers, especially that of Katrina Kimport. Pro-lifers, supposedly, make a big deal of Kimport’s finding that some women have abortions in the third trimester because they only recently learned they were pregnant. Zernike writes, “But for most women in the study, the new information was a medical diagnosis that could not be detected earlier in pregnancy.” Maybe so, but the study does not say that. Zernike continues, “The study notes that only a ‘small subset’ of women do not find out they are pregnant until the third trimester.” This is misdirection: Obviously it’s only “a small subset of people [who] do not recognize they are pregnant until the third trimester of pregnancy.” That’s irrelevant to whether it’s a small subset of the women who have abortions that late.

And it’s even less relevant to whether abortion should be prohibited, or at least restricted to cases of severe fetal abnormality, late in pregnancy. We have data suggesting that every year, thousands of abortions take place after week 21. We have no data suggesting that they are overwhelmingly, or even mostly, for medical reasons. We have evidence that Democrats, and organized pro-choicedom, oppose restricting abortions, even late in pregnancy, to medical emergencies; and that they would prefer nobody said so in public.

I’m sorry that unpacking this article has taken this many words, so let me summarize by reiterating what I wrote a few days ago — in reference to the same reporter, as it happens: Never trust New York Times reporting on abortion.