Customer Reviews

The Press and Abortion: 1838-1988 (Routledge Communication Series)

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Olasky's "Press and Abortion" needs an update. There's good stuff here, as Olasky presents a remarkably balanced view of how the press presented the issue and practice of abortion from 1838-1988.

Unfortunately, it stops at 1988. However, the quality of what is here is amazing, and is a great starting point for any media or historian hoping to understand what has been published on abortion.

Detractors might brand Olasky as a conservative not doing an honest job to a topic requiring more than a slanted viewpoint to research the book. Those detractors would've missed this gem. Olasky worked with the abortion backers such as the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood of NYC who provided access to much necessary documents. Similarly, he was able to find help from groups fighting abortion, like the Pro-Life Action League and Christian Action Council (founded by Billy Graham/C Everett Koop/OJ Brown). This support from both sides of the issue is unusual, and increases the value of "Press and Abortion."

Olasky begins with an assessment of things as they were in the early-mid 1800s. The now liberal Anglican, Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches were decisively against abortion. He cites from emphatic antiabortion statements by Wadworth (who became president at Harvard) and John Calvin to set the tone that America began, or at least was at that point in time, antiabortion.

He generaly avoids consideration of the issue as a religious or moral matter, but merely shows how the press--largely the newspapers, but also some magazines--handled abortion as a news and editorial issue.

Abortion began, he explains, in part, as a business decision by a couple placing ads in a major NY paper. They offered abortive services through a midwifery business, pretending to be physicians.

Olasky slowly develops the chronology to indicate how the popular press was reconformed, as a whole, into a new ideology of campaigning for abortion, how physicians sold abortive services for $5. The NY Times went from pro-life to pro-choice, and he cites the massive percentage of articles they published for abortion (90%).

He presents the public relation machine behind pro-choice organization, and the response of the "Detroit Free Press," "Washington Post" and others.

He highlights 1962 as a key year in pro-choice ideology, as the press seemed to make a large jump in writing stories about abortion clinic raids by the police, defining abortion as murder, and then decrying those who would deny abortions, claiming women needed liberating. Olasky discusses several important public events and editorials supporting this.

Later, he talks about Dr. Bernard Nathanson, once the founder of the Nat'l Abortion Rights Action League, but who became so pro-life that he developed a film portraying the pain the fetus feels mid-abortion, and how various press reviewers dismissed the short documentary as not scientific. NARAL, feeling no doubt quite slighted, panned the film.

Olasky finishes with some discussion of the fetal tissue transplant issue.

It is documented very well, with over 40 pp in an annotated works cited list.

Needed in an update are a timeline, explanation of what the stem cell issue is all about, and how the press has covered it.

I fully recommend "Press and Abortion" by Marvin N. Olasky for both conservatives and liberals, but both sides are likely to find concerns that their views were not covered well. Only for the open-minded, and thick skinned.

Anthony Trendl

I have to disagree with the other reviewer. I read this book as a student in Olasky's History of Journalism class at the University of Texas several years ago. Olasky writes with an obvious and declared anti-abortion bias and chooses his examples and even his wording with care. At the very beginning of the book, he goes into great detail about how he decided on his terminology for the book, and why he decided to refer to the "unborn child" rather than the "fetus" or another word for the victim of abortion. I am actually anti-abortion myself, but as a journalism graduate and writer, I can't condone the heavy bias of Olasky's book. It simply does readers and researchers a disservice.