When I was a reporter I’d sometimes hear a reporter come back with an anonymous quote for a story that was just perfect. I mean a perfectly perfect quote from an anonymous source. A source that said exactly what the reporter needed them to say with a flourish of the poet. And who wished to remain anonymous.
Editors would usually sniff these out pretty well. I remember one editor who would see quotes like that and just say, “horse hockey.”
Well, I just read this anecdote from an anonymous abortionist in the New York Times. And I’m betting that my old editor would be saying “horse hockey” on this one.
Now, could it have happened? Sure. It COULD have. Anything is possible. But I’m sorry, this story is just a little too convenient. I’m thinking some New York Times fact checkers should get on this. Frank Bruni writes:
He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that her head would be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him and other doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.
One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled.
She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”
“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”
A week later, she was back on her ladder.
You gotta’ love the little flourish of the abortionist heading to work who got worried because he didn’t see his favorite widdle pro-lifer on the ladder that morning. You know how caring and protective those abortionists get about those pro-lifers on the sidewalk.
I’m not saying that Bruni made it up all by his lonesome. I’m not saying the abortionist doesn’t exist. I’m not saying that this didn’t happen to an abortionist that might actually exist. I’m just saying what my old editor would say. Horse hockey.
