When I saw the headline to the Washington Post story: “This Texas teen wanted an abortion. Now she has twins,” I thought: Here we go again.
We were going to read about Texas, the state that had the nerve to limit abortions to around the sixth week of pregnancy and the many women who are now being forced to bear children.
There’s so many problems with this story, it’s hard to know where to start. I’ll try.
The narrative begins with a scene from the life of Brooke Alexander, who is trying to nurse two three-month-old twins in a run-down apartment with blankets as curtains. We learn quickly that she’s living in the home of her boyfriend after her heartless mother has kicked her out. This is the same mother who encouraged her to continue with the pregnancy in the first place.
Brooke found out she was pregnant late on the night of Aug. 29, two days before the Texas Heartbeat Act banned abortions once an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity, around six weeks of pregnancy. It was the most restrictive abortion law to take effect in the United States in nearly 50 years.
For many Texans who have needed abortions since September, the law has been a major inconvenience, forcing them to drive hundreds of miles — and pay hundreds of dollars — for a legal procedure they once could have had at home. But not everyone has been able to leave the state. Some people couldn’t take time away from work or afford gas, while others, faced with a long journey, decided to stay pregnant.
Nearly 10 months into the Texas law, they have started having the babies they never planned to carry to term. Texas offers a glimpse of what much of the country would face if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer. …
Did the couple use birth control? Did they care? It appears that the reporter never asked many basic questions. We do know that Brooke’s dad has been missing for much of her life; she talks about feeling that she is unattractive and all of a sudden here’s this guy paying attention to her.
Here we have two teens, both 17, who have unprotected sex apparently on the first or second date. She ignores obvious signs (two missed periods) until it’s too late; the Heartbeat Law is going into effect.
Sometimes Brooke imagined her life if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, if Texas hadn’t banned abortion just days after she decided that she wanted one. She would have been in school, rushing from class to her shift at Texas Roadhouse, eyes on a real estate license that would finally get her out of Corpus Christi. She’d pictured an apartment in Austin and enough money for a trip to Hawaii, where she’d swim with dolphins in water so clear she could see her toes.
Ah, the freedom that abortion brings. And the villains in this story? We will get there in a moment.
When she gets a positive pregnancy test, she doesn’t tell Billy High, her lover; she gets in a car and goes to the house of another male friend. Odd. By the way, she dropped out of school at age 15. Why, we’re not told.
Billy, who earns less than $10 an hour at a local restaurant, prefers hanging out at the local skateboard park to a paycheck. He wanted Brooke to get an abortion. This does not sound like a union that will last.
Unable to get an appointment at an abortion clinic, Brooke shows up at a crisis pregnancy center, which is run by a Christian group. An ultrasound says the fetuses are 12 weeks old; the couple have only been dating for three months, so do the math.
This is where the story, in a pattern seen in far too many mainstream news reports, veers into images resembling “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s time to meet the villains.
The Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend — which advertises itself as the region’s “#1 Source of Abortion Information” — is one of thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across the United States, antiabortion organizations that are often religiously affiliated.
When Brooke showed up with her mom for her appointment, she had no idea she’d walked into a facility designed to dissuade people from getting abortions.
Actually, the center states on its website that it doesn’t refer people to abortion clinics. Surrounded by waiting-room throw pillows and “watercolors of ocean scenes” she is “lulled” into a calmer state of mind.
Brooke picks up a booklet, which the Post says is full of wrong information about abortion risks. Then she gets the ultrasound, learn she has twins, and is railroaded by her mother and the ultrasound technician — into continuing the pregnancy.
Which she does, despite her quasi-deadbeat boyfriend, her nasty mother and Brooke having to give up a course to get a real estate license because she’s too sick and tired to study. The boyfriend at least pays a lot of Brooke’s bills, as she can’t work.
Oddly, the story skips details about the actual birth, which appears to have been sometime in March. Were there any complications?
What is happening at this point, in terms of basic journalism that attempts fair-minded, accurate coverage of the views on both sides of this debate?
For example, this story was crying for a quote from an ethicist. Is aborting twins worse than aborting one child? Would Brooke have kept the pregnancy had there been only one baby? It’s never really clear if the Post interviewed workers at the crisis pregnancy center.
Looking at her daughters, Brooke struggled to articulate her feelings on abortion. On one hand, she said, she absolutely believed that women should have the right to choose what’s best for their own lives. On the other, she knew that, without the Texas law, her babies might not be here.
“Who’s to say what I would have done if the law wasn’t in effect?” she said. “I don’t want to think about it.” …
There was only one way she could make sense of it, she said: Losing them now — as fully formed human beings — would be different from losing them back then.
How so? Could the Post have interviewed activists and scientists on both sides of that question?
As unborn children, they were budding human beings. What the law has done is give these babies a life. But all we hear about in the piece is how many career opportunities the mother has lost by bearing two daughters.
The Washington Examiner was the only outlet I found that noticed this doublespeak.
While some see this as an infringement on her rights, others see this story as a lifeline extended to the babies who were unable to speak for themselves.
Specifically, conservatives read Alexander’s story as a success, saving the lives of two children. Liberals are horrified that Alexander could not have an abortion and was forced to carry the babies to term. … For liberals, this story is a horrifying reality that would sweep the nation if Roe was overturned.
Near the end, we are transported to a meeting of local Republicans who’ve invited the director of the CPC to speak. It’s fair to ask: Was the director really the self-congratulatory jerk the article made her out to be?
Further down, there’s a photo of the two children sitting in a stroller set made for twins while the father skateboards in the background. Such strollers are expensive and I’m guessing that the bride –- who wouldn’t even spend $30 for her own wedding dress –- didn’t buy it. So, who did?
Crisis pregnancy centers are quite generous with baby clothes and supplies and expensive things like strollers, for which they get zero credit. If the much-villified pregnancy center supplied such a nicety to the couple, I hope the reporter would have told us so.
At the end of the story, the couple get married so she can get benefits while he enlists in the military where, hopefully, he’ll start acting like an adult. How long his enlistment will last is anyone’s guess; he says in the story he really doesn’t want to be in the Air Force. He just wants to hang with his skateboard.
The comments section for the story was filled with savage denunciations of Texans, Republicans, conservatives, you-name-it, for being the cause of this mess. Some even absolved the teen parents of responsibility because it was the state of Texas’ fault that these kids were either too poor to get birth control, take a pregnancy test at the right time or simply stay out of bed with each other.
Other readers, like Lila Rose, president of the pro-life group Live Action, whose tweet I reproduced higher up, was furious that the Post used this couple to portray Texas as a modern-day Gilead, the reconstructed country in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
What was missing in this article was a basic question: If two lives are worth saving, why isn’t one?
She likes having her children now, inconvenient as they may be, but readers are told that she still mulls over whether killing them would have been the better option?
I know you can’t research every angle in a story, but there are so many holes in this story, so many unasked questions, so many missing voices.
FIRST IMAGE: Online .gif from HBO’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”