Extremists are screaming about abortion again – and they're not pro-lifers.
In an April 9 piece [1], The New York Times Editorial Board criticized Kansas’ Senate Bill 95 [2], or the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act, signed into law April 7. The bill bans a common second-trimester abortion procedure beginning July 1. Flaunting its disgust, the board called the new law a “legislative assault” – an “assault” that partial-birth abortions have faced, too.
From the beginning, the board bashed the Kansas’ decision to be the first state to “ban the safest and by far the most common method of ending a second-trimester pregnancy.” That method, it said, is “dilation and evacuation, which involves dilating the cervix and removing the fetus, often in parts.”
Other terminology wasn’t acceptable. Senate Bill No. 95 [2]’s language “avoided actual medical terminology,” they whined, and instead used “dismemberment abortion” to describe the newly “banned procedure.” (In other words, describing abortion for what it is.)
“The law’s language aims for maximum shock value,” the board wrote, “describing ‘clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors’ or other instruments that ‘slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.’”
Because of the state’s fight against abortion, the board deemed Kansas “ground zero in the war to criminalize all abortions, and in the process to remove a woman’s ability to control what happens in her own body.”
And Kansas isn’t the only state under threat.
“[T]he anti-abortion armies forge tirelessly ahead,” the NYT board warned, “helping to enact hundreds of duplicitous restrictions on abortion in recent years.”
But Kansas stands out for trying to “capitalize on public squeamishness about safe and well-established medical procedures” – a technique used before, the board added.
“This same strategy,” the board added, “drove earlier bans on ‘partial-birth’ abortions.” “Now this method [dismemberment abortion] is under legislative assault, too,” it complained, “even though there is no dispute among doctors as to its safety or reliability.”
(Talk about a transition from defending “dismemberment abortions” to “partial-birth” abortions [3], where an abortionist ends a baby’s life while being born.)
Still, they believed Kansas “lawmakers have imposed their own moral judgments and restricted or criminalized decisions doctors make in caring for their patients.”
The NYT board concluded by mourning for women, especially “lower-income and other vulnerable women,” because they are “often the first to be denied the choice they have under the Constitution."
Just another example of how, from the editorial board to its blogs [4], The New York Times sticks to an abortion absolutist agenda.
— Katie Yoder is Staff Writer, Joe and Betty Anderlik Fellow in Culture and Media at the Media Research Center. Follow Katie Yoder on Twitter. [5]