From The New York Times
Ultrasound: A Pawn in the Abortion Wars
By Erik Eckholm
“Informed consent.” It sounds so reasonable.
That’s the stated goal of legislation being considered in Virginia that would require a woman seeking an abortion to first have an ultrasound, giving her an opportunity to examine the developing fetus and hear its heartbeat....
“To frame an issue is to reduce it to a story for which there is only one possible outcome,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics scholar at the University of California, Berkeley [School of Information]. In this case, he said, anti-abortion forces tried to define the ultrasound mandate as something benign and nonpolitical, while their opponents, with unaccustomed success, have cast it in the most ominous terms....