Narcissism on Steroids

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Just when you think you've heard everything, Debbie Nathan comes along, writing in the New Republic, to inform us that the New York Times is soft on abortion. All too often, Nathan tells us, Times stories are "pursed-lipped about abortion," indulge in "cryptic moralizing," and, as the story's subhead suggests, evidence "squeamishness about abortion."

Maybe this "New York City-based journalist" and author of "Pornography," which "explains the subject to teenagers and young adults," is onto something the rest of us have missed. Let's see.

Most of the piece, which ran February 14, purports to illustrate the Times' failure to follow through on its principles using a series of stories that ran in the Times' magazine and elsewhere. Each of her critiques either is entirely out to sea or never launches properly.

Nathan leads (as I strongly suspected she would) with Annie Murphy Paul's "The First Ache," a thoughtful, even-handed handling of the debate over fetal pain that ran in the Sunday magazine February 10.

Her argument boils down to Paul's giving any weight to the case for fetal pain, on the one hand, and the beside-the-point fact that most abortions are performed before unborn babies are sufficiently physiologically developed to experience pain, on the other hand. The simple truth is that it is getting harder and harder to deny the obvious: no later than 20 weeks into their development, unborn babies can experience pain beyond our imagination. That some of the naysayers Paul quotes exaggerate to absurdity (in Nathan's paraphrase, "Someone else says that even born babies can't feel pain until they're one year old") shows both that they are in deep denial and that Nathan is desperate to "prove" that "Clearly, there's no consensus on the issue."

But Nathan's real complaint is generational. "So, what's going on at the Times? Maybe only what's happening in the whole culture. Liberals and even feminists have bought into the reasoning that abortion is basically immoral, and if women could just be educated and dosed with birth control, we wouldn't have to terminate any pregnancies. Bill Clinton's famous formulation, that abortion should be 'safe, legal, and rare,' has become conventional wisdom."

Abortion--and repeat abortions--are the way of the world, Nathan huffs, and enough already with the "anti-woman moral judgments." Older, educated liberals--"the demographic that work at the Times, and a good percentage of its readership"--need to stop converting poorer, less educated women into "scapegoats." In this respect, the Times is no different than the "Right."

Just a quick concluding thought. The articles Nathan should lambaste are not the one she cites but the steady procession of self-adulatory "let me tell you about my abortion" profiles the newspaper runs incessantly. Here there is no pro and con, just pro: how wonderful, noble, feeling the writers are for having gone through their abortions with such élan and with the proper amount of "regret."

This is narcissism on steroids, the kind of moral idiocy that gives the anti-life side a bad name. But, then, why would you expect anything from the "anti-life newspaper of record"?