This piece is the second in a short series of reflections: anniversaries.
My wife Susan started in 1984 what was the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center, now called The Source. Living in pro-choice Austin, our slogan became “make an informed choice.” Volunteer counselors showed women pictures and fetal models of what was growing inside their wombs. Some who had leaned toward abortion gave birth.
Since the center was effective, the pro-abortion Austin American Statesman did a hit job on it. Happily, we had taped interviews the reporter did with Susan and the office director. The reporter had mangled the quotations so badly that the issue wasn’t even bias, but minimal professional standards.
Susan and I went to the Statesman offices and played the tape for the editors, hinting that we could sue for libel. The editors acknowledged the errors. They made restitution by giving us frontpage space in a Sunday section equal in length and prominence to the reporter’s article. The editors were honest within the confines of their ideology.
The crisis pregnancy center/pregnancy resource center movement grew enormously during the 1980s and 1990s, helped by a technological development revealed in a 1984 issue of the Journal of Ultrasound Medicine. Authors A.V. Cadkin and J. McAlpin, announced their “Detection of fetal cardiac activity between 41 and 43 days of gestation.” They detected “a tiny blinking, flashing, and/or rocking echo with a regular rhythm”—beating hearts, only six weeks after conception.
We always hoped the Austin American Statesman would let readers know about this reality. Along with wanting women to “make an informed choice,” we hoped journalists would popularize what the Journal of Ultrasound Medicine revealed. We hoped the Statesman when running an article on abortion would sometimes illustrate it with a photo of an unborn child, maybe following the adage of “show, don’t tell.”
As far as I know, that didn’t happen, and it’s unlikely to happen now. Sadly, the Statesman—like many other newspapers—is now so hollowed out that it sometimes doesn’t even report on an evening Texas Longhorns game the day after it happened.