Man Alive

(The American Prospect)  This column was written by Garance Franke-Ruta.

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A liberal, poet Robert Frost once quipped, is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. Nowhere is this truer than at The New York Times today on the subject of abortion. 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.

Editors explaining the dearth of women on op-ed pages, a subject that in the last year has received a great deal of attention, will frequently point to the broader society for explanation: Congress is 86 percent male; very few women hold executive positions in the business world; the academy remains overwhelmingly male at the level of tenured professorships; military leaders, diplomats, world leaders — all are overwhelmingly male. Thus, they say, it's not entirely the fault of newspapers that their op-ed pages rarely reflect women's voices.

One topic on which it would seemingly be easy to find female authors, however, is abortion. The vast bulk of the pro-choice side consists of groups founded, staffed, and led by women, and every significant pro-choice advocacy organization is also in some measure a women's group. That the issue even exists as public policy question worthy of discussion is a result of female agitation, legal strategy, and demands for autonomy. Abortion rights advocates, legal strategists, and political theorists together make up one of the rare political niches in which women predominate.

Because of this, you might think that those writing about this topic on the op-ed page of a liberal, officially pro-choice publication like the Times might similarly be largely female. You would also, however, be wrong.

A Prospect examination of the authors published between late February 2004 and late February 2006 found that 90 percent of writers — including staff columnists — who discussed abortion on the Times op-ed page over the past two years were male. These men wrote 83 percent of the op-eds that mentioned abortion.

Even more surprising, more op-eds that mentioned abortion in the Times were written by pro-life men than by women of any belief system.

While the unsigned Times editorials have remained resolutely pro-choice, their influence has sagged under the heavy load of conservative jurists, conflicted Catholics, and emotionally distraught men readers find on the op-ed page when they turn to the Times for thinking about abortion. This suggests either that the op-ed page now favors a much more doubt-ridden, hand-wringing stance than it has historically — or else that the Times, in attempting to balance its own editorial stance, has unwittingly engaged in one of the most egregious cases of liberal overcompensation in recent media history.

All op-eds that mentioned abortion during the two-year period were included in this analysis, rather than only those that were solely about abortion, because the broader category contained so many columns that took strong editorial positions against abortion, used conservative buzzwords to describe abortion procedures, or combined highly charged commentary on abortion with discussion of a number of issues, such as stem cell research, the Human Life Amendment, and the greatness of Ronald Reagan.

Another significant though smaller category of references, more commonly found on the pro-choice side, raised the abortion question only to discount its continued importance as an issue, warning, as Anthony Lewis did last October, that "(t)he most profound issue that will face the Supreme Court in coming years is not … abortion. It is presidential power." Such a statement amounts to an editorial position about abortion, even when included in an article primarily concerned with politics and electoral figures.

So, too, does the absence of certain voices, over time, suggest an editorial position on the part of the op-ed page editors. Over the past two years, voices from NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Organization for Women, EMILY's List, Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were entirely absent from the public conversation about abortion on the Times opinion pages. Pro-choice female academics, authors, and religious leaders were also largely shut out when it came to the topic of choice — as were pro-life or abortion-ambivalent women.

Indeed, what's most striking about today's op-ed page is the absence of women of any sort of writing on the subject of abortion. Of the 124 mentions of abortion on the page over the two-year period, only 21 of those instances were female-authored. In total, there were 67 authors who wrote about abortion for the Times — only seven of which were female. (Many authors wrote multiple columns mentioning the topic.) That's seven women over two years, compared with 60 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.

Nor can the absence of women be entirely explained by the 1994 retirement of columnist Anna Quindlen, who wrote primarily about the politics of family life, and her replacement by columnist Maureen Dowd in 1995. Quindlen, to be sure, wrote many reported, thoughtful columns concerned from lede to kicker with the complexities of abortion, while Dowd usually just mentions abortion in passing during columns devoted to political personalities or electoral questions; Quindlen wrote on abortion 81 times during her four-year tenure as an editorial columnist, while Dowd has touched on the subject 44 times over 10 years. Nonetheless, restricting the analysis only to op-ed page contributors with no Times affiliation, the percent of pieces discussing abortion written by women plummeted from 30 percent in 1991-1992 to only 7 percent by 2004-2006. In fact, Dowd's passing references artificially skew the number of women writing on abortion upwards. Far from being an advocate for reproductive rights, she is a former political reporter who still primarily focuses on presidential politics. She has never, over the course of a decade on the op-ed page, devoted a full column to an actual, substantive argument in favor of abortion rights. Nonetheless, she is responsible for close to half of the instances (9 of 21 mentions) in which a woman discussed abortion on the Times op-ed page during the 730-day period.

Without Dowd's occasional glancing references to choice and the work of two female guest columnists during the summer of 2004, the Times op-ed page would have been almost totally devoid of female defenses of choice — or even commentary on it — during the past two years. Those two were Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's Supreme Court reporter, and Barbara Ehrenreich, the well-known feminist and author, who were both brought in during summer 2004 while Dowd and Thomas Friedman were on leave or vacation. During those brief guest-columnist stints, they provided more than another quarter of the female mentions of abortion on the page (6 of 21 mentions). Times editorial board member Carolyn Curiel also wrote a single "Editorial Observer" column in Nov. 2004, "How Hispanics Voted Republican," that mentioned abortion.

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