The report warns, “news coverage of reproductive issues remains uneven in American media, with the people whose bodies do the reproducing (or not) often left out of the discussion.”

Why are women being pushed off the abortion topic? They aren’t, really.

The gap exists because there are more male reporters. In fact, an earlier Women’s Media Center report found that women wrote 37 percent of all print news articles, while men wrote 52 percent.

So the gender-breakdown for reproductive coverage precisely mirrors the breakdown for the rest of news stories, which is hardly evidence of a sexist or conservative conspiracy to skew discussions related to abortion.

Certainly, newsrooms should consider pipeline issues and ways to get more female reporters on their pages. But given the existing pool of journalists, it makes sense that abortion-related issues would be handled like any other issue.

In fact, one could easily imagine feminists protesting if the results were otherwise: If their research showed that female reporters were being disproportionately assigned to covering matters related to reproduction — or childcare, education or anything else that could be classified as a “women’s issue” — we’d be hearing complaints that hardheaded female reporters are being pigeonholed, perhaps even discriminated against, by pushed into stereotypically female beats.

The WMC complains that allowing men to “frame” these discussions of abortion-related issues perpetuates “the politicization of abortion rights and contraception . . . perpetuating a cycle of conflict and controversy that eclipses the complex realities facing women and men when it comes to reproductive health.”

That sounds an awful lot like the group’s leaders think female reporters would focus on touchy-feely personal stories rather than hard policy debates, a presumption stemming from some rather old-school stereotypes about women. Who here, exactly, are supposed to be the sexists?

After all, the ladies staffing the Women’s Media Center would surely object to anyone suggesting that differences between men and women might impact how suited they are for other lines of work, such as the military or law enforcement.

Of course, the group is right that who writes news stories matters: Reporters steer public attention and selectively highlight aspects of issues that meet their ideologies and personal preferences. Yet unless you believe that gender trumps all — that women really are from Venus and men are from Mars — then the sex of the reporter is a relatively minor factor to consider.

Far more central to giving the public a balanced picture on policy and political debates — including the abortion issue — are the journalists’ partisan allegiances.

Journalists identifying as Democrats outnumbered Republicans 4-to-1 in a recent study by the school of journalism at Indiana University. Pew Research found a similar breakdown in 2008: More than half of journalists claimed to be moderate, but nearly one third (32 percent) labeled themselves liberal compared to just 8 percent who identified as conservative.

If anything, these stats probably understate the true extent of the liberal skew: A study from 1996 — which may be before journalists were savvy enough to conceal their ideological biases — found that 89 percent of Washington-based journalists voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, compared to just 7 percent who’d voted for George H.W. Bush.

Surely we’ve come far enough in terms of true equality to recognize that this ideological lens has a greater impact on news coverage than whether the reporter has an extra X or a Y chromosome? Maybe the rest of the public has, but count on modern feminists to cling to stereotypes about the importance of sex differences for as long as it suits them.

Carrie Lukas is the managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum and vice president for policy of the Independent Women’s Voice.