The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [22]
To the extent that great literary works were being withheld from America’s youth, PC forces were seldom to blame. The real censors, though they received scant attention, were people like the school superintendent in Maryland who banned Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in 1997 after some parents called the classic of African-American literature “trash” and “anti-white.” And they were conservatives in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. “The real danger to Shakespeare,” Katha Pollitt accurately noted in The Nation, “is not that he will cease to be compulsory at elite colleges like Georgetown but that he will cease to be made available and accessible to a broad range of students.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s conservatives slashed budgets at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, and other public programs. Among the unfortunate results of those reductions in funding, such places as the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, Shakespeare and Company in Massachusetts, and the Folger Shakespeare Library had to curtail programs that train teachers and reach wide audiences.36
Conservative politicians had whipped up popular support for such cuts in the first place by—you guessed it—portraying the public agencies as hotbeds of political correctness.
One Scare Supports Another
Once a scare catches on, not only do its advocates have the offensive advantage, as the Shakespeare follies illustrate, but they can also use the scare as a defensive weapon in other disputes. This chapter concludes with an important case in point, in which the PC label was actually used to countermand a scientific fact.
Anyone who commuted by bus or train in the Washington, D.C., area during the mid-1990s or sought an abortion in the South in that period will probably remember this fear campaign. More than one thousand advertisements appeared in buses and subway stations around Washington and Baltimore alluding to a scary statistic: “Women who choose abortion suffer more and deadlier breast cancer.” In Louisiana and Mississippi legislators passed laws that require doctors to inform women twenty-four hours before an abortion that the procedure can increase their risk of breast cancer.37
Some antiabortion activists had been pushing the point since the early 1980s, when it first became apparent that as the number of abortions rose in the years after 1973, when the procedure became legal, rates of breast cancer also increased. Not until 1994, however, did the news media pay much attention to prolifers’ fear mongering. That year, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published an article in which researchers estimated that having an abortion might raise a woman’s risk of breast cancer by 50 percent.38
To their credit, journalists were circumspect about the study. In contrast to coverage of some other pseudodangers (road rage among them), the news media generally did an excellent job of putting in perspective the 50 percent figure. Reporters noted that other studies had found no increased risk, and that even if future research confirmed the figure, the import would be minimal for most women considering abortion. A 50 percent increased risk may sound large, but in epidemiologic terms it is not. It does not mean that if all women had abortions, half again as many would develop breast cancer; rather, it means that a woman’s lifetime risk goes up by 50 percent. If she had a 10