Why Women’s Voices Aren’t Heard on Abortion

A supposedly liberal dood blogger (who is also affiliated with a disproportionately male media enterprise) writes about abortion:

“Ultimately, brave people are going to have to stand up and start talking about their personal experiences with these things in a way which communicates “this could happen to you” to people.”

Gee, why didn’t we feminists think of that? Oh wait, we did, as Ann Friedman points out, writing in pertinent part:

It’s not a novel suggestion that we combat abortion restrictions by sharing real women’s (and some men’s) stories about why they made the choices they did. This is something the pro-choice movement has done since its inception, starting with speak-outs about back-alley abortions in the pre-Roe era. In the past few years alone, there have been several books, at least two documentary films (“Speak Out: I Had an Abortion” and “The Abortion Diaries“), and an entire monthly magazine devoted to sharing women’s personal experiences. Ms. magazine recently published the names of thousands of women who declared, “We Had Abortions.” And stories of the “it happened to me, it could happen to you” variety appear in the mainstream women’s magazines fairly regularly. Planned Parenthood collects stories of women who have undergone abortions — and tries to publicize them whenever things like Gonzales v. Carhart make the news. And lest you think that only women have spoken out, read this very moving post by a man who had to make a particularly difficult decision about a D&X abortion because his wife was incapacitated.

We need more feminist women in blogging and in government, that’s pretty clear. But will it ever occur to supposedly liberal doods that women might know more about abortion than they do? Not likely! Garance Franke-Ruta has written:

… 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. …

–Ann Bartow

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