There are claims so old, to paraphrase a famous line from the Partisan Review's William Phillips, that one can't remember the answers to them -- or recall much beyond the fact that they were demolished a long, long time ago.
Even while the front page of the New York Times on Jan. 16 was running the results of a poll showing that the arguments against abortion may have finally begun to reach the American public, the editorial desk of the nation's most prestigious newspaper was ginning up for its coverage of the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. And its efforts -- in celebration of the Supreme Court's decision that has allowed since 1973 at least 36 million acts of what 50 percent of Americans now consider murder -- proved much like a visit to the Victorian murderers' display in Madame Tussaud's wax museum: You can't remember much about the figures except that they were bad and were hanged a long time ago.
So Frank Rich in his Jan. 21 column pounced on the old linguistic point that "pro-choice" doesn't mean "pro-abortion" -- as though it were 1975 and he imagined that the battle over abortion were going to be solved by a change of vocabulary. The next day, the Times ran its own unsigned editorial, reminding its readers of the necessity to educate their girls in the tragic history of those dark days before Roe when "women died or were maimed as a result of illegal abortions" -- as though it were 1973 and it were still possible to daydream that all legal abortions were going to be perfectly performed in brightly lit university hospitals, instead of by the scum of the medical profession who in fact do perform most abortions and all too frequently botch them.
But the most astonishingly dated performance was the Sunday before, when the Times's Sunday magazine ran as its cover story an essay by Jack Hitt in praise of those courageous doctors who still practice as abortionists. A line like Hitt's "Dr. Alexander Nicholas is an observant Catholic father of three, which is not everybody's idea of an abortion provider" is so far beyond intelligibility, one doesn't know what date to assign it. But the entire article is such a parade of exploded statistics and outdated claims that reading it is like trolling through 25 years of Planned Parenthood press releases. All abortionists are brave heroes of women's rights, all those who are opposed to abortion are terrorists, thousands upon thousands of aborting women died before Roe and none has died since, abortion was legal until the Civil War, etc., etc.
Proof that none of this is true is out there, and if the Times's own poll is right, Americans are finally learning it. But not from their paper of record.