Posted on 07/27/2004 11:17:56 AM PDT by Pikamax
N.Y. Times Unaware Abortion Article Centered on Abortion-Rights Activist
By JACOB GERSHMAN Staff Reporter of the Sun
Ooops.
Editors at the New York Times Magazine say they are going to publish a note to readers saying they were unaware that a woman featured in a firsthand account of her decision to abort two of her triplet fetuses was a prominent crusader for abortion rights.
“The editors of our magazine did not know about [Amy] Richards’s activist background,” a Times spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, told The New York Sun by e-mail after the Sun had inquired about the piece.“We plan to run an editors’ note.”
Ms. Richards’s 871-word account of her abortions ran on July 18 in the magazine’s “Lives” back-cover column under the headline “When One Is Enough.”
In the piece, Ms. Richards describes her fears when she found out she was pregnant with triplets, and her relief to discover a procedure called “selective reduction” that allows a woman pregnant with more than one fetus to reduce the number of fetuses without aborting them all.
Ms. Richards said she decided to eliminate two of her fetuses after imagining life with triplets: “Now I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.”
Ms. Richards also expressed fears about being pregnant with triplets while living in a five-story walk-up and having to give up her job as a paid speaker on college campuses while on bed rest.
The “Lives” column features diarystyle essays typically written in the first-person “as told to” a New York Times Magazine writer.
In this case, Ms. Richards told her story to Amy Barrett, a frequent contributor to the magazine.The piece contains no author identification on the bottom of the page, as the “Lives” columns sometimes do.
“I didn’t keep my biography a secret from them,” Ms. Richards, 34, told the Sun. “You just have to go on the Internet and do a search. I did nothing to block my identity.”
A Google search on Amy Richards pulls up several short biographies of her. One on Feminist.com, for which she writes an advice column, describes how Ms. Richards in 1992 founded the Third Wave, a feminist organization that is geared toward younger women and funds abortions, and has co-authored two books on feminism, one of them titled “Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future.”
A 1992 graduate of Barnard College, Ms. Richards also is a paid consultant to Gloria Steinem and serves on Planned Parenthood of New York’s Council of Advocates.
Ms. Richards said her background as a feminist activist wasn’t relevant to the piece.
“I personally approached the story as a journalist,” she said.“It’s a piece of news information” about the selective reduction procedure.
Ms. Richards said Ms. Barrett is “familiar with my work as a writer.” Ms. Barrett refused to comment.
Conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who denounced the piece on her Web site, told the Sun she “found it incredibly misleading that [the Times] presented her as an average, common mother who had no other agenda but to pour her soul out to the public.”
For several days after the article was published, it was perhaps the most talked about newspaper story in the country. On the Internet, bloggers expressed outrage and some even speculated if the article was intended as a satirical knock on the pro-abortion movement.
“The essay reads like a parody published by The Onion or the Christian equivalent, The Door,” wrote Jennifer Graham in an article on National Review’s Web site. “It’s what I would have written in college had someone assigned me an 800-word parody that exposes the shallow and the callow of the thirty-something population today.”
No need for accuracy, they only used the Jayson Blair standards of Journalistic excellence!
Yeah. She really helped the cause with that article.
It's no different from any other Times reporting. I can't imagine what they feel the need to apologize for.
“Now I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.”
And the award for most selfish act of 2004 goes to ...
I'm still going with the fantasy fiction. I just don't think the NYT has a very good fact checker. LOL
Exactly.
The NYslimes was NOT
asleep at the switch.
Once again
it has been revealed
that the NYslimes
does not even
have a switch
or recognize that
it ought to.
Her activism or lack thereof does nothing to change the story one bit.
The related FR threads about this disgusting essay:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1173730/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1174241/posts
Your run-of-the-mill abortionist is a common and seedy sort of doctor who doesn't mind the stigma of his "job" while collecting twice the salary of your average OB/Gyn. They are the itinerant, foreign "docs" of questionable character and reputation.
But--this task of killing two-thirds was not done by a run-of-the-mill abortionist. This took surgical skill, talented technical assistants and state-of-the art equipment.
A real OB/surgeon of erstwhile good repute had to have done it--not just your flybynight.
It'd be interested to talk to that one...
The NYT doesn't mind publishing left wing propaganda as though it were newsworthy. What they mind is when they get caught at it.
Y'know, it doesn't really matter whether she's an "abortion rights crusader" or not. The simple, plain fact is that she killed two of her three unborn babies because it would inconvenience her fabulous Manhattan lifestyle, get in the way of her "career," and possibly cause her to turn into that most hated of feminist boogywomyn...the STAY-AT-HOME MOTHER (gasp!).
That's it. She killed two innocent lives because she didn't want to leave the Upper East Side and go to Costco to buy diapers. Period. It doesn't matter whether she's a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, or feminazi.
}:-)4
The woman in question furnished no evidence that she had killed two of them.
This could be a real "Jason Blair" story where it was made up.
She may well be pregnant and just wrote the story for effect. It fits the profile of NYT stories so it is not surprising that they didn't check any facts first.
I wonder if she'll explain to her only child what happened to his siblings?
She must feel really proud of herself.
Gag me alert.
Hmm. Isn't this similar to what happened during the first Million Mom March? The woman who organized it was presented in the media as just some ordinary everyday mommy from New Jersey or someplace, when it turns out she was on Hillary Clinton's payroll?
The writer for the NYTimes Magazine was familiar with Ms. Richards' work. The writer knew Ms. Richards is an abortion activist. For the paper to turn around and say they didn't know is either a lie, or it means they permit their writers do deceive them.
This article would have been a much less powerful piece of propaganda is it had included the information that Ms. Richards is an abortion activist. That is why either the author or the magazine editor (depending on whether you think the editor is stupid or mendacious) decided to leave it out.
We didn't have this kind of crap before direct-deposit.
She's got a point there. Almost immediately after her article was published on this site, freepers were able to dig up her bio and her writings. The idea that the Times didn't know her background is laughable.
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