NYT Shocked That Pro-Lifers Are Serious About Protecting Babies

The New York Times is shocked that the people who have spent the last 50-plus years promoting the sanctity of life aim to advance policy positions that effectively end abortion and protect unborn babies from conception.

In an article headlined “How Christian Conservatives Are Planning for the Next Battle, on I.V.F.,” NYT’s National Religion Correspondent Elizabeth Dias expressed concern that “a powerful battalion of conservative Christians” have “quietly laid the groundwork for their fight to restrict not only access to abortion but also to I.V.F.”

“They are planting seeds for their ultimate goal of ending abortion from conception, both within the Republican Party and beyond it,” Dias wrote.

There’s nothing off-kilter about pro-lifers supporting policies that promise to shield babies in their most vulnerable form from harm and destruction, whether that be through abortion or the discard or abandonment of frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization.

In fact, opposing IVF, or at least questioning why those who undergo the hundreds of thousands of IVF cycles in the U.S. each year get a free pass to get rid of unborn babies simply because they are embryos, is morally and logically congruent with the pro-life movement’s belief that humans are endowed with natural rights from the beginning.

Dias, however, seems to view the pro-life movement’s goal to protect unborn babies from murder on the state and national level as some secret agenda that is just now coming into the public light.

“As they see it, their challenge spans generations, not simply a single political cycle. And their approach — including controlling regulatory language, state party platforms and the definition of when life begins — reflects an incremental strategy similar to the one activists used for decades to eventually overturn Roe v. Wade,” Dias wrote.

Outsiders and insiders have both wondered whether the pro-life movement will remain effective in the wake of its Dobbs v. Jackson win at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dias’ concern that pro-lifers are dedicated to not only eradicating the stain abortion has left on our country legislatively but also taking a stand against the unethical pitfalls of IVF in states and non-government spheres like the Southern Baptist Convention, however, suggests that the NYT is mostly worried that pro-lifers will succeed again.

“The anti-abortion coalition knows that its ambitions would once again almost certainly be advanced by another Trump term, with government officials who share its goals and would be embedded in powerful positions,” she wrote.

Dias tried to discourage action by painting pro-lifers as extremists who “pursued policies at the edges” to secure their goals, despite the long list of evidence that Americans support more limits on abortion, not less. On IVF specifically, Dias claimed pro-lifers “face a tough political battle since their positions are largely unpopular and do not reflect majority opinion, particularly on I.V.F.”

Corporate media often use polls to overstate Americans’ support for IVF. A significant chunk of U.S. adults, however, claim they disagree with the unethical methods that Big Fertility has adopted as standard practice for IVF. This is an important discrepancy, yet it is hardly mentioned in publications like NYT.

The more you look at it, the more Dias’ sweeping generalization looks like an open attempt to discourage pro-lifers from evolving their policy proposals to better reflect their principles.

No matter how much the NYT or Dias tries to complicate it, life undoubtedly begins at conception and deserves protection. Anyone who claims to be pro-life but doesn’t center their policy goals around that core value is only doing damage to the cause.

IVF is no doubt the next frontier for pro-lifers to conquer, but that’s not a secret that NYT or other corporate media outlets are suddenly exposing. It’s simply the next logical step for a movement that claims to want to protect unborn babies from the beginning.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.