You probably are familiar with the old aphorism, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right.” I have a variation. I don’t care how much self-justifying gibberish abortionists offer to sympathetic reporters as long as somewhere in the interview they spell out what they do.

Enter “Telling the Stories Behind the Abortions,” a story that appeared Monday in the New York Times. The Times is so confident its audience will grasp the “moral” of the story that the newspaper increasingly runs stories that are astonishingly revealing.

Reporter Cornelia Dean’s subject is abortionist  Susan Wicklund, specifically Wicklund’s forthcoming book, “This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor.”

The reader is bombarded with the same-old same-old justifications for abortion, but he/she is also exposed to the gruesome side of killing unborn babies which is usually kept firmly under wraps.

For example, while Wicklund says “late-term abortions should be legal,” she herself won’t perform them. Why?

“In the book, she describes witnessing, as a medical student, the abortion of a 21-week fetus,” according to Dean. Wicklund “writes that at the sight of its tiny arm she decided she would perform abortions only in the first trimester of pregnancy.”

Then there is this remarkably candid admission. “Dr. Wicklund describes her horror when she aborted the pregnancy of a woman who had been raped, only to discover, by examining the removed tissue, that the pregnancy was further along than she or the woman had thought — and that she had destroyed an embryo the woman and her husband had conceived together.”

One other thought, or, in this case, an example of the absence of thought. Wicklund tells Dean that “If she detects uncertainty or thinks [the woman contemplating an abortion] may be responding to the wishes of anyone other than themselves…, she tells them to think it over a bit longer.”

Two breaths later Wicklund is denouncing informed consent/women’s right to know laws as “insulting” and “about control of women, about power…”

Providing women in a crisis pregnancy situation with a chance to reflect, to get their wits about them when (as so often is the case) loud voices all around her are insisting she abort, is neither insulting nor patronizing. It is, rather, to inject a small dose of the real-world into the discussion.

You can read Dean’s story in its entirety at www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/health/06abor.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=science&pagewanted=print.

 I would very much recommend you do.