New York Times Coverage Avoids the Third Rails of Sex Trafficking

T wo weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published an incredible feature about the world of sex traffickers, their victims, and police and nonprofits’ work to combat trafficking on Los Angeles’ Figueroa Avenue near the University of Southern California. It is an excellent piece highlighting a truly awful consequence of Democratic soft-on-crime, “equity”-motivated criminal-justice policies. Yet throughout its compelling, infuriating, and heartbreaking narrative, Times health reporter Emily Baumgaertner Nunn left untouched two third rails within the dynamics of sex trafficking: abortion and illegal immigration.

Let me begin with praise for the piece, which was relatively courageous for the Times to publish, given their usual, hyper-left-wing standards. The narrative follows three central characters: a 19-year-old sex trafficking victim who repeatedly gets into and out of situations of horrific abuse; a heroic 27-year-old female police officer who posed as a prostitute in an effort, alongside her team of vice officers, to take down traffickers; and a saintly nonprofit worker who never gives up in her work to save victims from lives of abuse and coercion. Police are presented as the clear good gals and good guys in the story, and their efforts to detain and thereby save victims of sex trafficking received the valiant framing they deserve.

The best aspect of the story is the devastating blow it strikes against one of the most absurd California laws passed in Gavin Newsom’s tenure, SB 357. This 2021 California statute decriminalized “loitering with intent to commit prostitution,” thereby neutering the police’s ability to intervene with trafficking victims. The loathsome state senator Scott Wiener — currently vying for Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco seat in Congress — introduced the law, and Newsom signed it. Because of this law, police are not allowed to detain someone obviously behaving and dressing like a prostitute; they need probable cause for some greater offense before they can make an arrest. These detentions are often the only way to intervene in the life of a child sex trafficking victim to get them out of the abusive control of their pimps. While the piece notes the “equity”-based rationale for SB 357 (the allegation that minorities and transgenders were unduly harassed by police for merely dressing outlandishly), its devastatingly wicked impact of hindering cops and enabling open child sexual abusers fills the reader with rage and disgust.

Still, there are sex trafficking issues that the New York Times either dares not discuss, or about which they have blind spots due to their biases. The first of these is illegal immigration.

The story has only one mention of “gangs that had long sold drugs”: Nunn noted that such gangs moved into prostitution because of the reusable, continuously revenue-generative nature of a sex trafficking victim, compared with narcotics as a one-time consumable good. While some of the gangs involved in Figueroa’s sex trafficking are domestic, the DEA has long reported that the Latin American drug cartels want to use sex trafficking to expand their business.

While the Times story recounts how women from around the United States have been brought to Los Angeles to be trafficked on Figueroa, it makes no mention of women brought across the border. It’s impossible that illegal immigration or the cartels have no involvement in supplying sex trafficking victims for L.A, where more than 35 percent of residents are foreign-born, 900,000 of whom are illegal aliens.

The other third rail is abortion providers, and what role they play for the trafficking industry. The story details the horrific financial “quotas” that trafficked women must meet for their pimps, servicing men every half hour to make what their traffickers demand. With such a large population of girls and women having so much sexual contact, there must be hundreds of victims getting birth control, the morning-after pill, treatment for STDs/STIs, and abortions. In a 2014 study, Laura Lederer, a legal scholar and former State Department official who is a pioneer on trafficking issues, published survey and interview results from a group of 106 survivors of American domestic sex trafficking. She found that 71.2 percent of them had at least one pregnancy while being trafficked, 21.2 percent reported five or more pregnancies, 55.2 percent had at least one abortion, 29.9 percent had multiple abortions, and more than half of respondents stated that their abortions were at least partly coerced.

A quick Google search reveals a Planned Parenthood clinic near Figueroa where the trafficked girls could potentially receive abortions and other services that allow them to stay on the streets. I do not have any knowledge that Planned Parenthood’s staff at this site is doing anything illegal, actively abetting traffickers, or failing in their duties as mandatory reporters for child sexual abuse. The article does note, though, that motel operators and other business owners in the area turn a blind eye to traffickers’ operations for fear of reprisals. Could such considerations intimidate Planned Parenthood staff members from their requirements as mandatory reporters? Pro-lifers have accused Planned Parenthood over the years of covering up or failing to report child abuse at clinics throughout the country.

Given the blatant character of sex trafficking in this neighborhood, an enterprising reporter might think to ask Planned Parenthood some questions: How many cash-pay abortions are happening in this clinic? What percentage of patients are minors unaccompanied by their parents?

The clinic also highlights the availability of its telemedicine services. Since 2021, the Biden-controlled FDA has allowed mifepristone, the “abortion pill,” to be prescribed via telemedicine and shipped through the mail, with no in-person appointment. One wonders how many of the victims of Figueroa are being forced by pimps to avail themselves of telemedicine options, not in-person visits, to lessen the risk of detection for their abusive situations — and in California, minors can receive such medical services without parental notification or consent. It is yet another example of why the Trump FDA should reinstate the requirement for a doctor visit before mifepristone is prescribed.

This New York Times feature goes a long way in tearing down liberal pieties surrounding “equity” and criminal justice. One hopes it will motivate readers on the left to support cops and the tools necessary to combat trafficking. But some critical aspects of the crisis, alas, remain taboo.