By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, August 21, 2022
Here’s a remarkable — stupid, awful, ghastly — document of our times: A group calling itself Physicians for Reproductive Health has published an open letter to the nation’s reporters and news editors, demanding that they pretend anti-abortion activists do not exist.
The group writes:
We are writing today with a big request: stop giving air-time to anti-abortion activists. . . . We know your reporting standards are to cover “both sides” of any debate. Allow us to be clear: Medicine and science are not up for debate. Health care is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. And the fact is, abortion is not in the realm of theory or belief. Abortion belongs in health care, social services, and public health reporting.
With this in mind, we are asking for a commitment from the community of media outlets reporting on abortion to keep in mind the true danger that you present when interviewing anti-abortion extremists. You are giving the opportunity for dangerous lies to spread. You are, by way of asking them questions, legitimizing their answers. You are allowing hateful, dangerous harassers to build a base that encourages protesting at clinics, stalking and harming clinic staff and abortion providers, and online and in-person abuse of people who have abortions and those who support them in getting that care.
This is mad and foolish in several ways.
For one thing, medicine and science are, in fact, “up for debate,” and health care is, in fact, very often a “matter of opinion.” Hence the ubiquity of such expressions as, “In my medical opinion” and “get a second opinion.” Debate is essential to science. This point may seem an obvious and trivial one, but it apparently needs repeating.
For another thing, the status of abortion is a matter of ethical and political debate, not scientific debate. There isn’t much scientific debate about what happens in the course of a typical abortion: A living individual organism of the species Homo sapiens is destroyed at an early stage of development. Scientists, pro-lifers, and honest abortion advocates mostly agree about that. The question is whether it matters, and, if it does matter, whether it matters in a way that ought to make it subject to legal regulation — as, indeed, it is in practically every decently governed nation on this Earth: At the moment, Switzerland and France have more restrictive abortion regulations than do New Jersey and California. There is a rumor afoot that they have scientists and doctors in Europe, too.
Pretending that political questions (which involve trade-offs, competing priorities, and rival goods) are scientific questions (which have falsifiable answers that can be arrived at by means of the scientific method) is a dishonest and sophomoric, if inescapable, feature of our politics. It is a very old delusion, stretching back from the dream of “philosopher–kings” through “scientific” progressivism (which produced forced sterilizations) and “scientific” socialism (which produced the Gulag) to the purportedly evidence-based approach of the so-called pragmatists of our own time. Sometimes, the conflation is the result of a genuine error, but often — as in the abortion debate — it is the result of a willful deception.
The problem for the deceivers is that their deceptions have a very short lifespan in an open society with a free press and instantaneous digital distribution of information. Because we have the First Amendment, it is very difficult to practice traditional state censorship in the United States, though there have been innovative efforts to do so, for instance by trying to suppress criticism of climate hysteria under the guise of policing securities fraud, as some Democrats have attempted to do with publicly traded energy companies and nonprofits those companies support. Kamala Harris, who is one feeble heartbeat away from the presidency, is one such practitioner of backdoor censorship.
But on the whole, that is a hard row to hoe. Instead, the progressives — who occupy the commanding heights of media, entertainment, education, and much of corporate America — have settled on a strategy of opt-in totalitarianism, using political and social pressure to coerce private institutions and companies into doing the Left’s political work for it. If you have, for example, engaged in political speech of an unwelcome kind — even if it was dumb stuff you said as a child — then you may be subjected to censure in the form of, say, a revoked college admission. Our open-minded progressive friends campaign to keep books from being published or stocked in bookstores, to have nonconforming periodicals removed from the shelves, to arm-twist gutless magazine editors into firing controversial writers, to pressure social-media platforms to suppress actual journalism from actual newspaper reporters, to use access to education and employment as a means of imposing political discipline, etc. The taste for suppression is difficult to satisfy — l‘appétit vient en mangeant — and, like a bad pornography habit, the need becomes more exotic and more specific over time.
For example, you have to read pretty deep into this New York Times story about a woman who has killed several women with whom she was romantically involved before you discover that the “woman” in question is a man named Harvey who decided, after some prison time, and after he was implicated in the attempted rape of an eight-year-old girl, that he would henceforth be a woman. This leads to such inexplicable sentences as: “People close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms. Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.” Just so. This is what it looks like when you are trying to do news journalism while tied up inside the wet sleeping bag of ideology.
If you have the power to impose a sexual delusion on the New York Times, then why not impose selective blindness on the press, too? Why not insist that the press simply black out pro-lifers and their views? It isn’t such a stretch to imagine it: A newspaper such as the Times or the Washington Post might suffer a Ross Douthat on the opinion page, but there is something very close to ideological homogeneity on the reporting, editing, and management sides of things, at least when it comes to such issues as abortion. (When I wrote about abortion for the Washington Post, I was edited by Ruth Marcus, who is something of a pro-abortion extremist. She was great, I don’t have any complaints about her editing, and the experience was a good one for me, but it is impossible to imagine the reverse — a hardline pro-abortion columnist being assigned to a hardline pro-life editor at a major newspaper — mostly because there are few if any such editors at major newspapers.) It is impossible to imagine someone with, say, Alexandra DeSanctis’s views working as a managing editor at the New York Times rather than being assigned to, at best, some conservative-designated cubbyhole on the opinion page.
The non-argument from Physicians for Reproductive Health is a familiar one: that opposing views are not just opposing views but are “dangerous” and “harmful” — that the communication of such views may be tantamount to violence or may, in some magical way, actually constitute violence. But imagine the kind of mind it takes to write this sentence: “You are, by way of asking them questions, legitimizing their answers.” To demand that reporters stop asking questions is to demand that journalism cease to exist, that the people who work today as reporters give themselves over wholly to propaganda.
Of course, Physicians for Reproductive Health wouldn’t dare to ask such a thing if so many reporters hadn’t already given themselves over partially to propaganda. But nobody would have dared to demand that Twitter and Facebook act as arms of the Biden campaign if those social-media giants hadn’t already shown themselves so eager to do so, and nobody would expect Harvard to engage in ritual self-abasement if it weren’t already on its knees. At some point, the leaders of these institutions will have to learn to stand up for their own interests, or they will see themselves surpassed by new institutions that do the things their institutions used to do. At some level, institutional leaders understand that: The panicked sneering at the plans for a University of Austin is terrific proof of just how fragile the status-farming syndicates at the top of the educational world know themselves to be.
Newborn children and adult idiots both operate under the misapprehension that if they close their eyes the room becomes empty. You can try dropping those with views contrary to your own into a dank, dark, media oubliette, and you may even get a little something out of it. But the real world doesn’t go away just because you’ve stopped looking at it.
You’d think the abortion lobby would have figured that out after Dobbs.
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