The Last Voice for Choice
In her farewell column, published August 23, Ashkinaze described Chicago as she’d found it: “Our town’s racial and ethnic boundaries were straining at the seams. Its schools were on the brink of disaster. Its infant mortality rates rivaled those of Third World nations. It seemed full of invisible people. Chicago was their town, too, but it was just beginning to feel their behind-the-scenes machinations, gentle persuasions and rage. Though renowned for the fearlessness of its journalism, it had more than its share of columnists who wanted to slow the rate of change, as far as women and families were concerned. I had a chance to write a different kind of column, and I jumped at it.”
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“I’ll tell you something else,” she went on. “I never set out to convert people, to change people’s minds about abortion. Abortion is one of those things when you write about it you’re writing for two camps whose minds are pretty well made up. What I tried to do in my column is present a point of view that is very seldom presented among Chicago columnists. I think what I did, I did over and over again until it put some people’s teeth on edge. But somebody had to do that. There are people on the other side doing it all the time.”
At least two prochoice Sun-Times women–“families” beat writer Leslie Baldacci and “workplace” writer Cindy Richards–have declared an interest in taking over from Ashkinaze. There have been other inquiries from outside the paper.
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“I’m sure,” says Jaffe, “the editor who did that was trying to avoid offending somebody.”
