I would consider the reporter to be private but it's not labeled as such.  We should probably label it as such.  I did a github code search to find instances of `reporter.abort` and found nothing:

https://github.com/seomoz/vanguard/search?q=reporter.abort&ref=cmdform

...so I'm OK removing it here.  If someone complains we can always add a deprecation to 2.99 later.