Sure, the New York Times is consistently, openly, ardently pro-abortion. But it could be more pro-abortion! Or so argues The New Republic’s Debbie Nathan.

News stories also sometimes issue strange and conflicting messages about abortion. Last spring, for instance, a long piece appeared on the front page: “Today’s Face of Abortion in China is a Young, Unmarried Woman,” by Jim Yardley with Lin Yang contributing. The article’s point seemed to be that, back when China coerced married women to have only one child, it wasn’t their fault they had to get abortions–but now, single young women are obtaining them voluntarily. And this is bad. Why bad? The article reeks with veiled references to selfishness and irresponsibility. The first paragraph says, “it was her second abortion in 18 months.” Indeed, most patients sitting at a clinic with this woman have already had an abortion; one is on her sixth! And how did they find the clinic? The article notes that private abortion clinics proliferate in China now, and newspapers there run “sensational” ads promising “Painless Abortions.” (The reporters seem unaware that ethnic papers in New York City, such as El Diario, are stuffed with identical ads, and that most abortions in this country are done at private facilities.)Again, numbers are used out of context. The Times cites the number of abortions per year in China, and the number in this country: 7.1 million there, 1.29 million here–an alarming differential until you recall that China’s population is over four times that of the US. The article never mentions this basic data.

“Her second abortion in 18 months.” Notice that what Nathan objects to is the reporting of simple facts that do not support Nathan’s political preferences. Of course, The New Republic is no stranger to obscuring politically inconvenient facts–or to making up fictitious facts that comport with the magazine’s politics–but what kind of journalist objects to the reporting of a salient fact because a reader might draw from that fact an inference that the journalist finds objectionable? And a society where abortion is permitted as a rare, last-ditch measure is qualitatively different from a society such as Russia where abortion is used in place of contraception and multiple abortions are a ghastly fact of life. If China is becoming more like Russia in that regard, surely that’s of some interest to the cosmopolitans in the Times’ readership.

Further, the fact that most abortions in the U.S. are performed at private facilities is to be expected, but the proliferation of private abortion facilities in China is something new–i.e., news–and the only reason to keep that out of the paper is because abortion fundamentalists like Nathan want to ignore the facts. And since when is it the job of a news story to “send a message”? There’s plenty of advocacy in the Times’ news pages–but The New Republic wants more?

And who doesn’t know that China has a big population? It’s the one thing most Americans know about China.

In fact, Nathan’s only substantive criticism of the Times’ journalism stems from the paper being too eager to plead the pro-abortion case:

Then there was the disturbing flap at the Magazine two years ago, after a cover piece about illegal abortion in Latin America reported on a woman in El Salvador who supposedly was criminally convicted for aborting her 18-week fetus. Post publication, it turned out the woman was actually judged guilty of murdering her newborn, full-term baby. The reporter had never bothered to read the court records, and the Magazine’s factcheckers hadn’t either. In its eagerness to champion abortion rights in a country that has none, the paper had gotten sloppy.

Sloppiness is one thing, but Nathan seems to be miffed that the Times hasn’t been sloppy in a way that affirms her own worldview more frequently.

If you’re wondering what sort of person finds the Times to be insufficiently rabid in its abortion advocacy, consider this gem from Ms. Nathan’s blog: “I’m presenting my new book Pornography. It was published late last year by Groundwood, a Canadian children’s press.”