Abortion heresy

Illogical positions lead to revealing slips of the tongue | Marvin Olasky

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

A pro-abortion culture requires eternal vigilance. Heresy can sneak through. The New York Times has for four decades maintained abortion orthodoxy, but an editor should be fired for not cutting out a tender dialogue in the next-to-last paragraph of a 7,500-word lead story in the newspaper six weeks ago.

Let me set the scene: A husband and a wife have had 15 failed pregnancies and in vitro fertilization non-starters. Author Alex Kuczynski, a fine writer, comes perilously close to falling off the cliff when she describes a "fetus" that didn't make it past 10 weeks as "a small dead baby" and quotes a nurse as telling her, "In case you were interested, it was a girl." But she quickly regains her footing and writes, "I was not, in fact, interested in attaching a gender to the coagulation of cells, briefly and potentially human. . . ."