The NYT's Woman Problem

By Garance Franke-Ruta, The American Prospect. Posted March 22, 2006.

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 has in the last year 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 remain 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 positions about abortion, even when included in an article primarily concerned with politics and electoral figures.

Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.

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