At The American Prospect she writes:
…”The past two years have seen one of the most contentious and closely watched presidential contests in 40 years, the retirement of the first female Supreme Court justice, the appointment of two new justices, and an attempted Senate filibuster against one of them specifically because of liberal concerns about how he would vote on choice issues. And during that period, not one op-ed discussing abortion on the op-ed page of the most powerful liberal paper in the nation was written by a reproductive-rights advocate, a pro-choice service-provider, or a representative of a women’s group.
“Instead, the officially pro-choice New York Times has hosted a conversation about abortion on its op-ed page that consisted almost entirely of the views of pro-life or abortion-ambivalent men, male scholars of the right, and men with strong, usually Catholic, religious affiliations. In fact, a stunning 83 percent of the pieces appearing on the page that discussed abortion were written by men.” …
“It has not always been thus. The Times was just as dedicated to the topic in 1991-1992, the last time abortion rights were as contested as in the past two years. But it was much better about printing women’s opinions on choice issues back then. Of 129 mentions of abortion during that two-year period, 46 were in columns or op-eds written by women. That’s 36 percent female voices on abortion in 1991-1992, compared to just 16 percent (less than half as many) today. In other words, the absence of women writers cannot be explained by a genuine shortage of women qualified and eager to discuss the topic in a prominent publication.” …
Read the entire article here.
