Abortion: partial truths

Covering the passionately charged issue of abortion always tests the press. In the latest facet of the debate -- which began in June 1995, when antiabortion members of Congress introduced a bill to ban what they call the "partial birth" abortion procedure -- the press came up short. Now that the bill has begun a second journey toward President Clinton's desk (he vetoed it in April 1996) the media are getting a second chance.

Some doctors contend a ban would not reduce the number of abortions, only restrict the method. Still, in terms of strategy, the bill is formidable. It turns the spotlight away from the rights of women over their bodies and futures and onto the realities of a procedure used to terminate a fetus at a point when it looks like a baby In terms of law, the ban's backers fashioned it to prohibit this method at any point in a pregnancy -- thus potentially tunneling under the protective wall of Roe v. Wade. That decision allows states to restrict abortions only after a fetus could survive outside the womb, a point that is debated but is thought to occur between twenty-four and twenty-eight weeks.

Some context: U.S. doctors perform roughly 1.4 million abortions a year. Of those, only 1 percent, some 14,000, are done after twenty weeks of pregnancy. That's when this procedure -- "intact dilation and extraction" or D&X, as providers usually call it -- sometimes is used. In D&X, the fetus is pulled part-way into the birth canal, where the contents of its head are suctioned out so it can be pulled out the rest of the way.

Partisans on both sides of the abortion divide have distorted the facts about how many women get such abortions, and why. Some anti-abortion advocates suggested that it is regularly used in the third trimester, after twenty-six weeks. Yet neutral experts estimate only some 320 abortions a year of any kind are performed in the U.S. after twenty-six weeks.

Abortion-rights leaders, on the other hand, insisted that the procedure is performed quite rarely and only when the fetus is badly deformed or the mother's health is in danger. It was this line that Clinton followed in vetoing the bill. In fact, the evidence indicates that the procedure is not so rare and is most often used on healthy mothers with healthy fetuses. Partly because such distortions were left standing, a straightforward debate about this procedure, and about late abortion, was never fully joined.

Where was the press? At best, most of the media reported the two sides' widely divergent "facts" without trying to determine what was true. At worst, important voices -- including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio -- simply repeated the abortion-rights advocates' version, without attribution, in news stories.

There were exceptions. One was Diane Gianelli of American Medical News, an AMA weekly. Her reporting on abortion is a journalistic gold standard. David Brown, a physician, sorted through some of the confusion in The Washington Post last September.

The first mainstream reporter to investigate some of the distortions, also last September, was Ruth Padawer, thirty-five, of The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey. She covers a "gender and society" beat she created four years ago.

Following is an interview with Padawer.

Q: How did your story on this debate get started?

A: The religion writer said, "I need a sentence or two to throw in just to explain what this debate is about." And I said, "I'll get back to you in a couple of hours." So I called various people on various sides of the issue, expecting to get different views about the merits of the D&X procedure, but I was overwhelmed by how different each side's take was on the very facts -- how often it occurred, when it occurred, why it occurred, the circumstances under which it occurred. I was very confused and motivated to find out more.

Q: Where did you start?

A: Because the governor [Christie Whitman] had said the procedure wasn't done in this state, I called a clinic in Englewood, New Jersey, just hoping they would know people in Manhattan who did it. I talked to one doctor who said that he didn't do it but that he knew of some people who did, and he'd get back to me. While I was waiting, I called another physician there who said, "I do them."

Q: Same clinic?

A: Same clinic. He told me he did it and all of his buddies did it -- including the first doctor I had talked to. So I was taken aback. This doctor gave me all the details, the circumstances under which he did it. Like everybody else I talked to afterwards, he said it was the procedure that he preferred and the procedure he would try first. In about half the cases, he was able to use it. He said it was quicker and safer for the woman, because it avoided going in with sharp instruments and poking around. He estimated that the clinic annually performed 3,000 to 5,000 late abortions -- after twenty weeks and no later than twenty-four weeks -- and that about half of those involved this D&X procedure.

Q: You talked to others?

A: I spoke to a high-level administrator there who was a physician also, and he answered the same way. His estimate was 3,000 abortions, half of them using this method. I talked to another doctor outside of New Jersey. They all had the same assessment of the women who wind up getting abortions beyond twenty weeks -- they are teenagers, people who are poor, people who have a lot of chaos in their lives.

Q: Your significant findings were . . .?

A: That these men were telling me that their clinic alone did at least 1,500 of these procedures a year. The pro-choice side was saying that only 500 were done nationwide. The second thing was that the pro-choice side was saying that the procedure was used only, or almost only, in the most dire medical circumstances, but the providers I spoke to in and outside of New Jersey all agreed that such cases were a small minority.

Q: Your story came out on September 15, 1996. What was the reaction?

A: Initially none. Two days later, The Washington Post ran [Brown's] story, and four days later a New York Times story referred to both. Then the pro-lifers jumped all over my story and Xeroxed it and passed it all over the place. Quietly the pro-choice movement was criticizing it.

Q: So, you found yourself elevated by one side and attacked by the other. How did you feel at this point?

A: Frustrated and angry. I felt very uncomfortable being used by one side. I understood why they did what they did, but nevertheless, I felt very uncomfortable. As for my treatment by the other [abortion-rights] side, I felt really angry, too, because I knew that I was telling the truth and they were telling anybody who would listen that I wasn't.

Q: Your story was the first real reporting in the mainstream press about who gets this procedure and why. Yet even your story came some fifteen months alter the bill had been introduced. Isn't it strange that it took so long for journalists to go talk to doctors?

A: Yes. When something comes across one's desk where the claims and facts are so contradictory, you have to look into it. This experience has made me question everything that comes past my desk. Everything. Not just about abortion, but any claim at all.

Q: Is bias a part of what's going on here? Let me quote Karen Tumulty of Time "By and large, journalists have bean far more willing to accept what facts and figures and examples are brought to them by the abortion-rights side and discount the other side's argument" Jonathan Alter of Newsweek said something very similar [both on PBS's Media Matters].

A: I don't feel comfortable interpreting why other reporters did what they did, but it certainly seems possible that unconsciously people were influenced by their politics.

Q: Then came the Ron Fitzsimmons "I lied" story. [Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, told Gianelli of American Medical News in February that -- because he had researched it -- he knew that most D&X abortions are performed on healthy fetuses in healthy mothers, even though he and other pro-choice loaders had said otherwise.] How did you follow up on that?

A: I started out by going to people in his own organization. Their president forcefully defended him and defended his coming clean. Like Fitzsimmons, she defended the procedure, and said it was important that it be protected. And I spoke to other people -- providers, clinic administrators, lower-level activists. A lot of them not only agreed with what Fitzsimmons said, but supported his guts in coming forward. Because, for them, saying that this procedure was used only in these dreadful cases was a betrayal of the people who they mostly serve -- people who were healthy, who had healthy fetuses, and who had a whole bunch of other reasons for having abortions.

Q: In other words, they thought that there had been a false debate?

A: Yes, and they felt frustrated. A lot of clinic administrators and abortion providers wish that, beyond these so-called partial-birth abortions, there was a more frank discussion about what actually happens in an abortion and, at the same time, about what brings women to clinics. They see more complexity than the public debate ever really reveals.

Q. Is it part of the press's role to facilitate a straightforward debate?

Absolutely. First, by getting the facts right. But the harder part is exploring the social circumstances of abortion. For example, about half of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended, and half of those unintended pregnancies end in abortion. That's ripe ground for journalists to explore, why those numbers are what they are.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe