This weekend, in reporting on the partial-birth-abortion decision that came down Friday, the NYTimes repeated the old dismissive myth about partial-birth-abortion–that it’s a rare/nearly non-existent procedure: “The law forbids a method of abortion that has been infrequently used, in rare or unexpected complications of pregnancy mainly in the second or third trimester.”

The head of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers outed that lie back in 1997, but the media have held firm to the dated characterization–even as numbers from the abortion industry’s numbers’ shop, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, have backed up Fitzsimmons’s contention. (See the pba and more Roe myths debunked here.)

Of course, that this is a legal procedure at all seems indefensible, however many occur.