Careful, well-informed editors are a blessing to columnists and scribes like me. By catching our bloopers they keep us from looking as dumb as we might. By making sure that our facts really are facts, they keep us out of court in this suit-happy age. More than once an editor has saved me from myself.
A couple of years ago, however, a piece I wrote about abortion raised editorial red flags, not just in my home paper, but in a newspaper office downstate as well. Both editors were alerted by copy editors to a possible error in my column that week.
The tale I told in that column had to do with some sad soul who was headed to prison because she had tossed her newborn into a dumpster instead of taking the baby home to cuddle it and coo at it as most mamas do.
In my column I dared to suggest that our legal system is confused. It threw this woman in jail for trashing her infant, while it would have jailed any protester who tried to keep her from killing the same baby a hour or two earlier at an abortion clinic.
“Wait!” the copy editors yelped. “Aren’t third trimester
abortions illegal in
But suddenly the question was no longer a question. In
headlines across
For those who haven’t been keeping up with the news, these are abortions performed by puncturing the brain of a fully developed baby while it is still partially in its mother’s womb. That’s as late in the third trimester as you can get. And it’s legal.
Although Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) is staunchly pro-abortion, he said he would vote to overturn the President’s veto because partial-birth abortions are “too close to infanticide.”
He’s right, of course. That veto (which allows doctors to kill babies) makes jail terms for mothers who dispose of their newborns harder to justify. And, like my capable editors, I doubt that most Americans are comfortable with that.