An interesting article on press coverage of partial-birth abortion: Abortion: partial truths. There’s a ferocious national debate, the factual claims of the two sides are radically opposed, and it takes fifteen months for anybody in the mainstream press to call a local clinic and try to find out what’s going on.
What’s behind this story? Is abortion an issue where the facts don’t matter because the truth is already known? One that touches people too closely to be the object of disinterested investigation? Is the desire to know nothing behind the refusal to make moral judgments, or is it the other way around? A study finds frequent mental health problems after abortion. It appears that the attempt to make life fully rational in the modern sense doesn’t work, and the news coverage of abortion is additional evidence of the same thing.
Liberals may ultimately find
Liberals may ultimately find that technology and the free exchange of information giveth, and technology and the free exchange of information taketh away. Abortion is bound to get more difficult as more of the truth reaches the light of day. When Junior’s 9-weeks-along photos are in the family album it will be difficult to argue that his 9-weeks-along little sister is just tissue for arbitrary flushing:
http://www.gemedicalsystems.com/rad/us/4d/thennow.html