However the Times, they are a changin'.
In the LA Times, we can read about abortionist Marina Chechneva trying to dissuade women from having abortions:
These days, Chechneva is writing magazine articles about fetus development in hope of raising public opposition to abortion. After years of handling fetuses, she explains, she has come to feel a responsibility toward the unborn children.
"They should realize that what they're doing is already a murder," she said.
The world has turned upside down. It's the abortionists pushing the uh, fetus fetishism.
It's the abortionist who is calling it a murder.
Gosh, I wish we had it that easy in Canada! Wow, the abortionists doing our work for us. My goodness, that would really speed things up now, wouldn't it?
Driven by a growing discussion of abortion as a moral issue and, most of all, by a government worried about demographics, doctors and politicians are quietly struggling to lower what is believed to be one of the world's highest abortion rates.
Impossible! We all know that abortion is a religious issue. It can not possibly be that in atheist Russia they're questioning a woman's right to choose.
Can't be. Only religious people do that.
And not only are doctors talking about the fetus, they're practically doing the work of crisis pregnancy centres:
"The attitude has changed," abortion practitioner Alexander Medvedev said. "Even in community clinics, doctors are trying to dissuade patients from abortion.
(...)
Speaking in her private clinic while women in their 20s filled the waiting room outside, Smirnova pointed to pictures of fetuses taped to her office walls and described the conversation she holds with a would-be abortion patient.
"I ask her to please explain to me and give me the reasons why she can't preserve her pregnancy. I'm not satisfied with, 'I'm afraid.' I want to hear the whole story. 'What did the father-to-be tell you, what did your mother say?' There were cases when I myself called her mother in another town. By appealing to her mother, her partner, the future father, you can often succeed in making her change her decision and preserve her pregnancy."
Lord, give us doctors like that!
The discussion is devoid of terms such as "pro-life" or "pro-choice." From doctors to patients to officials, nobody seems to consider seriously the possibility of outlawing abortion. But the government recently imposed new restrictions on the procedures after the 12th week of pregnancy, and toughened the language of a waiver that Russian women must sign before terminating a pregnancy.
I'm sure the feminists are screaming that it's the apocalypse.
The honesty and bluntness with which abortion is treated is positively breathtaking:
"You kill not only a child, a living being, but a part of yourself, something that was alive in you," said Irina, a 25-year-old Muscovite who has had three abortions. The young women who were interviewed declined to give their last names. "There's a trauma and a grief you suffer. You murder a child. It was much more difficult than I expected."
And yet...so schizophrenic:
The spiritual position," said Natalia Karpovich, a leader of the State Duma committee focused on family, women and children, "should be that this is murder and the woman who does this commits a sin. Still, I want to stress it's a woman's choice."
Legalized murder.
Is anyone else thinking of the Holocaust?
Karpovich is among Russian lawmakers who've pushed for media messages casting abortion in a less neutral light. She also supports new measures meant to encourage childbirth by paying out cash bonuses and opening new day-care centers across the country.
"Like on packs of cigarettes or bottles of alcohol, advertisements for abortion services should be obligated to warn about the consequences," she said.
"That they may result in infertility, that some bad changes may happen in the female organism."
Truth it advertizing. That's what it's called.
