The media fell for ‘pro-life’ rhetoric — and helped create this mess

About three decades ago, an obstetrician and gynecologist named Shalom Press delivered my first child at Children’s Hospital in Buffalo. My regular doctor was away, and while I didn’t know his substitute, the birth of my son went smoothly. Afterward, I was far too busy to give any significant thought to exactly who brought him into the world.

But I had reason to think about Dr. Press a great deal several years later, when Buffalo, a longtime abortion battleground, erupted into chaos. By 1998, I was the managing editor of the Buffalo News when another local OB/GYN, Barnett Slepian, was murdered in his own home by an antiabortion extremist, James Kopp; in 2002, Kopp made a jailhouse confession to two of our reporters.

In the aftermath, Dr. Press became one of the last Buffalo-area doctors willing to withstand the public pressure and continue performing abortions. At one point, protesters invaded his office and chained themselves together with bicycle locks; at another, local police informed him that a Canadian newspaper had received an anonymous warning that he was “next on the list.” These experiences were both alarming and eye-opening for Press’s son, Eyal.

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