By Dave Andrusko

Last week we debunked a cover story in Newsweek, a pompous pro-abortion exercise in self-congratulation masked as giving both sides a fair shake.

“Debunking another sledgehammer attack on the Movement” demonstrated that Kurt Eichenwald’s preposterously self-important insistence that as a representative of the “rational middle,” he had come to “examine the hypocrisy and flaws in the activists’ positions and finally bring this war to an end” was sheer pro-abortion propaganda.

But having carried all that water for his fellow pro-abortionists, Eichenwald’s reward was to be hammered by pro-abortion extremists times ten, such as Katha Pollitt. She hated the column for their own reasons but grudgingly conceded in her story for The Nation

What makes Eichenwald’s “both sides do it” claim so strange is that his piece is actually a sustained and detailed attack on the anti-choice movement.

But Pollitt had nothing on Sady Doyle whose head scratcher of an essay, “WHY DOES NEWSWEEK’S ‘ABORTION WARS’ COVER SHOW A CARTOON FETUS INSTEAD OF A WOMAN?” appeared at Elle.

Doyle’s subhead nicely captures what peeves her so: “By focusing exclusively on a Pixar-cute fetus, Newsweek is ignoring the people most affected by ‘The Abortion Wars’: people with uteruses.”

Doyle spends the first part of her turgid essay bemoaning that the Newsweek cover of an unborn baby is too big; too detailed (or, in her words,” too replete with “digital improvements”), and the like. She appears to be guessing the baby is around 13 weeks.

But Newsweek, as far as I can tell, doesn’t give us the baby’s age so it seems odd to trash the publication because most abortions take place before 12 weeks. Then in the tone that runs through the piece. Doyle sneers, “the embryo being removed is less ‘futuristic Gerber baby,’ more ‘lentil-sized clump of cells.’”

But for Doyle, the image, “to be blunt,” is toxic because it looks

More like a baby. And, given the presence of the word “ABORTION” in all caps, we can assume it’s not going to be around for long. Intentionally or not, the Newsweek cover sums up what’s wrong with how we talk about abortion: Everything is about the fetus, which is humanized, and the actual pregnant person is erased.

What? Since the baby is “not going to be around for long”–she will be killed–the cover personifies, so to speak, everything that’s wrong about the abortion discussion. The woman, who will be out and about, is “erased.”

Of course it is the baby who is erased, but no matter.

So, I’m guessing the ideal cover is to obliterate the child altogether. If Newsweek is going to write about the “Abortion Wars,” the cover should be that of a freshly aborted woman, right?

After that exercise in tedium, Doyle spends the bulk of the remainder of the essay trying to “prove” this point:

Furthermore, even in cases in which someone aborts a pregnancy after twelve weeks, the pregnancy is in many cases not healthy: Second and third-trimester abortions often happen because the mother’s life is at risk, or because of severe birth defects that don’t show up until later in the pregnancy.

But that is simply not true. As NRLC’s Dr. Randall K. O‘Bannon has shown, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), whose commitment to unbridled abortion cannot ever be questioned, have shown that the reasons women have abortions have precious little to do with the “tough” cases.

“Understanding why women seek abortions in the US” tells us, with respect to abortions that take place both in the first-trimester and later abortions, that “Reasons related to timing, partners, and concerns for the ability to support the child and other dependents financially and emotionally were the most common reasons women gave for seeking an abortion.”

As for delays, what is the most commonly cited reason women in the late-term abortion group gave? “[R]aising money for the procedure and related costs.”

Doyle insists pro-lifers don’t “see” (my word) “the actual person in whose uterus it [the baby] is presumably housed.” Of course we do, which is why there is an ever-expanding network of women-helping centers, legislation to provide a few dollars to help them provide for their saintly work, and laws that give women a chance to THINK before they abort their helpless and hapless and wholly innocent child.

The irony is, of course, lost on the Sady Doyles of this world who are blind to how their ideology works as moral blinkers. Why does the unborn child not exist–why is no there there ? Why is the “house”–the woman’s womb–empty rather than full of life?

Because she says so.