NYT Inadvertently Uses Pro-Life Logic To Hit Cruz On Campaign Finance

Rachel Stoltzfoos

The New York Times borrowed a favorite line of logic from the pro-life movement Wednesday in an effort to hit Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz with campaign finance allegations.

Cruz took out two loans in 2012 that may have helped his Senate bid, but did not disclose them to the Federal Election Commission, which requires the disclosure of loans borrowed to finance a campaign.

A spokeswoman for the Cruz campaign told The New York Times one of the loans contributed to the campaign, and failure to disclose it was “inadvertent,” but she did not address whether the second loan, a line of credit from Citibank, also funded the campaign. That’s when The New York Times took up the same logic used by pro-lifers to justify efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.

“Even if the Citibank loan did not go directly into the Senate campaign, it could have freed up other assets for that purpose,” reported TheNYT.

Pro-lifers use a similar argument to justify defunding Planned Parenthood, even though it’s illegal for the non-profit to use federal dollars for abortion procedures. Even if the federal money doesn’t directly fund abortions, the access to half a billion taxpayer dollars every year ostensibly allows other funds to shift to abortion.

You might say it could “free up other assets for that purpose.”

But the understanding of that concept demonstrated by TheNYT in its hit on a Republican presidential candidate is conspicuously absent in the paper’s coverage of renewed efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.

“Anti-abortion groups have long pushed to defund Planned Parenthood, even though no federal money is used to provide abortions,” the editorial board explained in July, after undercover videos brought to light Planned Parenthood’s practice of harvesting fetuses for researchers. “But that hasn’t stopped their efforts to shut down the clinics, which provide services like contraception, cancer screening and other tests.”

A September report similarly left out any mention of freed up assets. “Federal law already bans the use of tax money for elective abortions, but House Republicans want to end all government financing for Planned Parenthood, which provides an array of other women’s health services,” the report reads.

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