Abby Johnson

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Finding voices on both sides of Texas abortion debate? The Atlantic comes out on top

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Finding voices on both sides of Texas abortion debate? The Atlantic comes out on top

In recent weeks, Texas has swung back and forth between prohibiting abortions after six weeks, then being forced bu judges to allow them, then managing to forbid them once again.

Currently, once the fetal heartbeat is detected, abortions are forbidden in the Lone Star state.

Meanwhile, journalists have gone full court press on the matter. There’s no surprise there. But did anyone strive to talk to women and men on both sides of this hot-button issue? Hold that thought.

Now, I don’t expect Hollywood ever to be balanced on the topic but a recent offering in The Hollywood Reporter on 12 abortion-positive movies was over the top, even for them.

It’s been 49 years since the two-part “Maude’s Dilemma” — written by future Golden Girls and Soap creator Susan Harris — premiered, but the choice faced by Bea Arthur’s title character, finding herself pregnant at 47, and the determination of Norman Lear’s show to discuss that choice in depth, and engage in a nuanced debate, would be provocative in an American broadcast sitcom today.

It’s still incredibly rare to find TV comedies dealing with actual abortions, though shows like Girls and Sex and the City used it as a conversation piece. Frequently, American television falls back on abortion being a thing characters talk about on-camera, do off-camera and then never speak of again..

Then comes the list:

“Dirty Dancing” a clear and unapologetic argument for reproductive choice.” “Grandma,” which is “abortion as a regrettable but necessary option in many young women’s lives.” Or “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” about “a candid and clear-eyed contemplation of abortion as a choice arrived at not with hand-wringing but with sobering pragmatism.” Or “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” about “love, whimsy, joyful bohemia and tenderness no less than healthy anger over injustice.”

You get the picture.


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FX documentary on Norma McCorvey omits key Catholic sources who knew her best

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Years ago, a pro-life activist told me that her movement had several dirty little secrets — as in people who had been on the abortion-rights side of the equation, then flipped to the other side but were impossible to deal with or had weird lifestyles.

One such personality was Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of the famous 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

Shortly before McCorvey died in 2017, she consented to being part of a documentary that just aired on FX Networks (I saw it on Hulu) last week. McCorvey’s “deathbed” assertions first hit the Los Angeles Times:

When Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case, came out against abortion in 1995, it stunned the world and represented a huge symbolic victory for abortion opponents: “Jane Roe” had gone to the other side. For the remainder of her life, McCorvey worked to overturn the law that bore her name.

But it was all a lie, McCorvey says in a documentary filmed in the months before her death in 2017, claiming she only did it because she was paid by antiabortion groups including Operation Rescue.

“I was the big fish. I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she says in “AKA Jane Roe,” which premieres Friday on FX. “It was all an act. I did it well too. I am a good actress.”

Many of us religion reporters who were working in the 1990s also interviewed McCorvey. There is no way she was putting on an act when I talked with her and I know other journalists who’d say the same thing. The most gaping hole in this story is linked to McCorvey’s conversion to Catholicism and the wealth of evidence that she sincerely practiced that faith.

After watching the movie on Hulu, it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s false about this woman. She’s switched personas more than once in this battle.


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Is it me or does this NYT story on anti-abortion movie 'Unplanned' contain a lot of extra qualifiers?

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Regular GetReligion readers are familiar with the concept of scare quotes.

For those new to the term, Dictionary.com defines scare quotes as “marks used around a term or phrase to indicate that the writer does not think it is being used appropriately or that the writer is using it in a specialized sense.”

Journalists frequently use scare quotes in coverage of “religious liberty,” for example, a sort of journalistic raising of the eyebrow, as we have noted from time to time.

A recent New York Times story on the controversy over the anti-abortion movie “Unplanned” doesn’t rely on scare quotes. But in quoting anti-abortion sources, the piece repeatedly employs what might be characterized as a similar tool.

I’m talking about the Times’ repeated use of qualifiers in the indirect quotations. I’ll elaborate on what I mean in a moment. But first, here’s the top of the story with a few crucial details:

CLIFTON, N.J. — It was a rare packed house for a weeknight in the suburbs, and when the movie was over, the sold-out crowd of about 100 last Wednesday spilled haltingly into the light.

A few — a gaggle of nuns in their habits, at least one collared priest — wore their dispositions on their sleeves. Others communicated in muted gestures, dabbed at tears, or lingered for long stretches in the popcorn-strewn vestibule at the AMC multiplex here, as if still processing the deliberately provocative movie they had just seen.

Since March 29, similar scenes have played out across the country as faith-based groups and many others have gathered en masse to see “Unplanned,” a new movie that paints a scathing portrait of abortion rights in general, and Planned Parenthood in particular.

A few paragraphs later comes the first instance of a qualifier:


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Houston Chronicle's latest abortion-law package feels like another NARAL brochure

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Abortion is a big deal in Texas news these days, mainly because of a law that requires abortion clinics to meet the same safety standards as hospital-style surgical centers. The law also says that abortion doctors must have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

For instance, If you have a colonoscopy, or some other form of "minor" surgery, you have to show up at one of these surgical centers. The law obligates those who perform abortions to have the same safeguards used with these other procedures.

Logical, right? Not necessarily, according to its opponents, who will appear Wednesday before the Supreme Court to argue a case known as Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt. 

This past week, the Houston Chronicle mounted a full-court press showcasing the dangers of this law. These stories sound straight out of the public-relations playbook for NARAL, the nation's oldest abortion-rights group whose acronym used to stand for National Association Abortion Rights Action League. It's now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. A Chronicle story released this past weekend called “150 stories take aim at abortion stigma” starts thus:

They are attorneys and administrative assistants, actresses and anthropologists, computer scientists and clergy members. Millennials and baby boomers. Married and single.
All are women who have had abortions and whose stories were gathered in four legal briefs asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a controversial Texas law that creates stricter regulations for clinics and doctors that provide abortions.


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