The biased, left-wing Snopes attempted to refute another LifeNews article last week.
Its “fact check” rated reports that an abortion clinic employee told a patient to “flush” or “drown” her baby who survives an abortion as “unproven.”
Without linking to the actual LifeNews article, Snopes claimed, “The exact meaning and intended meaning of the employee’s remarks are open to interpretation and require further clarification.”
The LifeNews article highlighted a Live Action undercover video showing a New York abortion worker tell a woman to leaver her baby in a toilet if the baby is born alive. The 2013 investigation by Live Action gained renewed attention this year as U.S. Congress debated a bill to protect newborn babies who survive abortions from infanticide. Watch it here.
“Our investigators exposed this New York abortion facility, which says they will put a born-alive baby in a jar of ‘solution’ to drown her,” Live Action founder Lila Rose tweeted in February. “They also say to ‘flush’ the baby down the toilet, or ‘put it in a bag’ if she’s born alive.”
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The undercover investigation showed an investigator seeking an abortion at 23 weeks of pregnancy at Emily’s Women’s Center in the Bronx.
Snopes implied LifeNews’s and Live Action’s reports were misleading because the abortion worker’s statements were not clear.
It claimed:
In each of these three prominent examples, Live Action, its president, and the website LifeNews.com claimed that the worker had advised the woman posing as a would-be patient to dispose of a living baby born after a failed abortion either by “flushing” or “drowning” the baby, or putting it “in a bag.”
Whatever one’s overall view of the remarks made by the employee of Dr. Emily Women’s Center, or the tone in which the employee made them, the specific claim that the employee told a woman she believed to be a prospective patient to end the life of a viable baby is highly questionable, and the issue hangs on subjective interpretation of inherently ambiguous statements.
Snopes claimed the employee may not have understood that the baby in the situations posed to her was alive and viable.
“It’s quite possible the employee was speaking, in her mind, about a fetus which was non-viable, and showing only involuntary movements, moments before its inevitable and definitive demise,” according to the report.
But Snopes’ own transcript of the conversation suggests the employee did know:
Live Action: So if you had to put it in that jar, what if it was like, twitching, or something like that?
Employee: The solution will make it stop
LA: Ok
E: [Laughs] It’s not going to be moving around in the jar.
LA: Ok, the solution would make it —
E: Yeah. That’s the whole purpose of the solution.
LA: So if it looked like it was like, breathing or something like that?
E: It’ll automatically stop. It won’t be able to.
The investigator asked what to do if the baby was moving and breathing – clear signs of life. Viability also now is between 22 weeks and 23 weeks, so a baby who survives an abortion at 23 weeks would have a good chance of surviving with proper medical care. The earliest known premature baby to survive was born after 21 weeks and 4 days of pregnancy.
Snopes said it sent a list of questions to the abortion facility to clarify the employee’s comments, but it did not receive any response.
