Abortion and "other things related to sex"

In Sunday's New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal warns, "Anti-abortion effort in Europe, with U.S. Money, Widens its Conservative Agenda."  (The next installment in the series, "Abortion-funding effort around the developing world, with U.S. Money, Widens its Liberal Agenda", is -- no doubt -- coming soon).  Consider this:

For most of July, pedestrians in Lodz found themselves face to face with 14 grisly billboards pairing images of aborted fetuses with photographs of blood-spattered bodies - victims of genocide in Srebrenica and Rwanda, or toddlers killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Placed by a Polish antiabortion group, the traveling exhibition, which moved on to Lublin, exemplifies an aggressive, well-financed and growing conservative movement across Europe that opposes not only abortion but often other things related to sex, like sex education, contraception and artificial insemination.

"[O]ther things related to sex."  Of course, for most engaged pro-lifers, abortion is not really "related to sex."  Abortion is wrong (if it is wrong) not for reasons having to do with sexual morality, but because it is, or at least can be, the intentional killing of an innocent human being.  After repeatedly noting the hand of the Catholic Church in the emerging anti-abortion trend, the article continues:

Nowhere is the change more evident than here in Poland, where abortion was free - and freely accessible - under Communism. A relatively restrictive abortion law was passed in 1993 (it refers to the fetus as a "conceived child") and a strong social stigma has since emerged, along with an antiabortion stance among doctors' groups. The result: only 174 legal abortions were performed nationwide in 2004.

Recently the country's leading gynecology journal refused to publish the World Health Organization's guidelines on "Safe Practices in Abortion," calling them "reprehensible."

"Abortion is not safe, because a patient who undergoes such treatment always dies," wrote Andrzej Barcz, editor of the journal, Practical Medicine-Obstetrics and Gynecology.

In context, it is clear that the reader is supposed to regard this (unremarkable) observation by Barcz as something truly shocking.  But why?  Then there's this:

Women's groups in Europe [rg:  presumably, "pro-abortion-rights women's groups] contend that antiabortion positions have been promoted by otherwise mainstream politicians with debts to pay. In Poland, the Solidarity movement, which overthrew decades of Communist rule in 1989, received financial and moral support from the Catholic Church when it was still illegal under Communism.

"Otherwise mainstream"?  But, given what the author just told us about Poland, it is clear that the anti-abortion position is, in fact, "mainstream."  Is the word supposed to be descriptive, and to relate to the facts on the ground, or does it instead have some kind of clear, fixed, political meaning (i.e., "in line with the views of those who write for and read the New York Times")?   

This piece is striking, even for the Times.