If I had to sum up last week’s media maelstrom on Texas’ new abortion regulations, it’s this: 95% of the quotes was from those who opposed it.
Meanwhile, maybe 5% of the quotes came from those who favored it. And of that 5%, how many of them were inserted near the top of the piece rather than strung together near the end? How many came from actual interviews with women and men on that side of the issue?
We’re talking about the Texas Heartbeat Act, aka S.B. 8, which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected (usually around six weeks). Individuals who learn of violations can sue the clinics involved and anyone who helps women get abortions.
Which could your friendly Uber or Lyft driver, which is why both companies, according to CNBC, have offered to cover legal fees for any driver caught transporting a woman to a clinic.
Probably the most thoughtful mainstream-media dispatch was Emma Green’s piece in The Atlantic. It was a Q&A more than an essay, but at least it was an interview with the Other Side, which has been lambasted everywhere else for introducing a real-life Handmaid’s Tale situation into the Lone Star state. The lead sentence began:
Sometimes, the Supreme Court does the most when it does nothing. Last night, the justices denied an emergency petition by abortion providers in Texas seeking to block S.B. 8, a law banning pregnancy terminations after roughly six weeks’ gestation.
A 5–4 majority of the justices argued that they had no power to stop the law from going into effect, since none of the citizens who are now empowered under the law to sue abortion clinics for providing the procedure has yet attempted to do so.
Hold that thought. What’s new in Texas is something called “private enforcement,” by which any citizen -– and I mean anyone –- can report, or sue, someone trying to sneak an abortion past them. It’s a stunning legal strategy that evades the lawsuits that groups like Planned Parenthood use to quash their opponents.
Some on the pro-life side, like conservative pundit David French — who is strongly pro-life — aren’t happy with it at all. French argues that it’s bad law that will end up biting its supporters in the end. He is not the only abortion opponent who feels this way but there was zero reporting out there on the mixed feelings in his camp (which is a very important and interesting story).
Back to The Atlantic:
Legal challenges likely lie ahead. But abortion opponents see this as a victory, however temporary. For now, at least, abortion clinics in Texas are largely suspending their work and abiding by the ban.
The article continues as an interview with John Seago, the legislative director of Texas Right to Life who, more than anyone, contributed to the success of this law.
Right away, Green jumped to the crux of the law; people reporting on other people. His answer:
There are two main motivations. The first one is lawless district attorneys that the pro-life movement has dealt with for years. In October, district attorneys from around the country publicly signed a letter saying they will not enforce pro-life laws. They said that even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, they are not going to use resources holding the abortion industry to account. That shows that the best way to get a pro-life policy into effect is not by imposing criminal penalties, but civil liability.
The second is that the pro-life movement is extremely frustrated with activist judges at the district level who are not doing their job to adjudicate conflicts between parties, but who in fact go out of their way to score ideological points — blocking pro-life laws because they think they violate the Constitution or pose undue burdens.
For anyone wishing to understand why Texans went to this “private enforcement” stratagem is because they’ve tried everything else for the 48 years that Roe v. Wade has been in effect. And with a legal system set against them no matter what they do, it was time to come up with something else. And they attempted to do that.
Instead of screaming about how medieval Texans are, reporters could ask what happened during decades of frustration that drove abortion opponents, a coalition that includes a few surviving pro-life Democrats — to this point.
The New Yorker, whose reporting on the matter — for the most part — approached hysteria, explained things this way:
S.B. 8 was written so that the burden of enforcement lies entirely with private citizens, who are allowed — encouraged, really — to file lawsuits against anyone who performs an abortion after the six-week mark, or who “engages in conduct that aids and abets” an abortion, or who even “intends” to do such a thing.
Plaintiffs do not need to know the person they file suit against, and, if they win, they are entitled, in most cases, to ten thousand dollars from the defendant and the reimbursement of their legal fees; defendants who win cases do not get their legal fees back. This bounty mechanism has made S.B. 8, so far, immune to judicial interference, because there is no clear entity that can be sued in order to block the law.
Hopefully all this is clear.
This being a blog about religion, I was intrigued to see how little about religion appeared in the first few days of articles. Do reporters assume that the religious lines are already drawn and that none of the faith groups have anything original to say?
(Yes, I did see the RNS piece, but it’s not news to me that the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice dislikes the law. A female rabbi –- also opposing S.B. 8 -- was interviewed, but I would have liked to have seen what an Orthodox Jewish source would have said.
Don’t report the obvious. Look for the undercurrents. Look for the debates that reveal new questions.
It was tough to find any reporting that gave the (mostly religious) backers of S.B. 8 a voice. Instead, their opponents were allowed to define them.
In this Washington Post piece, for instance, the proponents overwhelmed the piece and it was many paragraphs before one could discern that the opponents of abortion actually had something to say.
Although reporters almost exclusively interviewed the opponents in most pieces I read, none seemed to get their heads around the fact that, nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade, vast portions of the country despise it. Does anyone care why? Or is the view of (mostly) religious people that life begins at conception — and should not be aborted away — seem so flat Earth and too ridiculous to merit a mention?
Objectivity, that rare bird, was thrown to the winds and certain wishful thoughts were presented as facts. For instance, there is no constitutional right to an abortion. I don’t care how many times the media parroted this erroneous thought.
For instance, this piece in the New York Times called abortion a constitutional right. No, “privacy” is a constitutional right granted by the Fourth Amendment (which had to do with unreasonable searches and seizures) and you can get that its original writers weren’t thinking of abortion when they penned it. The debates, to this day, center on the U.S. Supreme Court linking the two.
Back to media behavior, if you want to have a laugh, click on this greatest hits list – by Fox News — of media meltdowns.
The reporting wasn’t totally skewed. This New York Times piece actually had a photo showing people of color in a pro-life march (puncturing a hole in the theory that abortion opponents are all detested white evangelical males) and had plenty of quotes from pro-lifers, including those with mixed feelings about the bill.
What about Texas media? The Houston Chronicle tried to follow what was happening with trolling by pro-choicers of a right-to-life website set up to enforce S.B. 8.
With the “heartbeat” bill going into effect as Texas law Sept. 1, a conservative group has created a website where individuals can anonymously name suspected violators of the law, such as Goody Procter or Giles Corey.
Some Texans, however, are using the site to troll the group.
Conservative group Texas Right to Life set up prolifewhistleblower.com, a website site that has a form where whistleblowers can write out details of the supposed violations, including doctors behind the alleged abortion, and even upload files to support their claim if they wish.
Some are already using the site to submit fake tips. Many trolls are including photos of pornography, some in reference to animated characters like Shrek.
After cutting and pasting comments from Reddit, the article ended with:
Trolls, you might actually win this one. Stay tuned, Texas.
If the situation were the other way around, would the Chronicle be crowing about it?
One casualty of the new law will be the “abortion supercenter” along Houston’s Gulf Freeway, touted by Planned Parenthood as the country’s largest. (My former church was less than a mile from the place, which was situated between large Hispanic and black neighborhoods in a poorer section of the city –- and near the University of Houston).
I wrote about it here. The Chronicle (for which I worked from 1986-1990) has said that the supercenter does abortions up to 19 weeks, although it has the capacity to do them up to 24 weeks. So, how is S.B. 8 affecting them? This new ruling has got to be cutting into some profit margins.
The most macabre story that ran this past week concerned a clinic that churned out dozens of abortions at the last minute. Headlined “67 abortions in 17 hours: Inside a Texas Clinic’s race to beat new six-week abortion ban” the accompanying story was by the19th.org, an Austin-based non-profit that puts out a newsletter purporting to offer reporting on “gender, politics and policy.” They did say this at the bottom: “The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has been a corporate sponsor of The 19th.”
The online Texas Tribune, which also has Planned Parenthood as a funder (why isn’t someone reporting on how PP has inserted itself into the news mix?), revealed that the law would affect 85% of all abortions in the state. It also said:
Attorneys from Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Whole Woman’s Health, another abortion provider involved in the case, said the uncertainty around the law has created “chaos on the ground.”
Doctors and providers planned to remain at Whole Woman’s Health clinics in Texas until 11:59 p.m. Tuesday to provide abortions before the law took effect and the clinics' waiting rooms were “filled with patients and their loved ones,” the organization said on Twitter.
Of course Texas Right to Life has gotten slammed.
For example, GoDaddy.com, a web hosting service, dumped their site, so the organization had to find alternatives. (Why they were on GoDaddy is a mystery; here’s a 2012 Forbes piece slamming the hosting service for unethical practices).
The Dallas Morning News came up with an original angle on how the business world might punish the state as well.
Texas has taken controversial stances on two big topics this week: abortion and elections. But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defended both on CNBC on Thursday, claiming Texas’ stance would bring in more business rather than scaring companies away.
“People vote with their feet, and this is not slowing down businesses coming to the state of Texas at all. In fact, it is accelerating the process of businesses coming to Texas,” he said on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street….
Abbott argued that more people are moving to Texas than any other state and said companies are attracted by the state’s business climate, which he touted for having low regulation and a constitutional ban on income tax.
Abbott brought up the well-documented increase in businesses leaving the liberal state of California to come to Texas. He said Tesla CEO Elon Musk “had to get out of California because in part of the social policies in California, and Elon consistently tells me that he likes the social policies in the state of Texas.”
So, reporters are finding tons of stories out there. The oddity of it all is how few of them have any faith connection at all, even though people of faith are heavily represented on both sides. Some religion ideas:
(1) Who was the legal mind behind this bill and a similar — and underreported effort called the “sanctuary cities” movement — in Texas? Love it or hate it, it takes some talent to come up with a legal strategy that has Planned Parenthood screaming murder. Was this person a Catholic (being that a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting on this issue is by Catholics)?
(2) Everyone is bemoaning the effects the law have on poor and minority women but there are organizations out there, such as BlackGenocide.org, that believe women of color should be helped to keep their babies, not abort them. What are they saying about this? Call some Black or Latino churches and find out.
(3) Do Buddhists, Sikhs or Hindus have anything to say about this? You never hear them interviewed. Any recent immigrants from India are fully aware of the massively skewed gender ratios in that country due to decades of aborting girls. Thoughts?
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