And the “Lie of the Year” award goes to … Planned Parenthood.
It should come as no surprise to pro-lifers, but the source of the label certainly does. The Washington Post, a prominent but liberal news outlet, recently included the abortion chain’s claims about illegal abortions in its list of top lies, or “Pinocchios,” of 2019, according to National Review.
Earlier this year, the Post’s fact-checker exposed the abortion chain’s lie that thousands of women died every year in illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade. The newspaper gave Planned Parenthood CEO Leana Wen its maximum “Pinocchio” score, meaning what she said was completely false.
Wen parroted the common pro-abortion talking point several times while she served as leader of the largest abortion chain in America.
“Thousands of women died every year” before Roe v. Wade due to unsafe, illegal abortions, she told MSNBC in May. She made basically the same claim on Twitter a few weeks earlier.
But “it isn’t just Wen who peddles this fiction. One of the foremost arguments wielded against abortion restrictions is the claim that limiting the procedure wouldn’t stop abortion from happening; it would merely give rise to ‘back-alley’ abortions,” National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis wrote.
She noted that Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren similarly speaks often about the supposed dangers of making abortion illegal again.
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Here’s more from the report:
But as [the Washington Post fact check] demonstrates, the country before Roe was hardly suffering from a maternal-mortality crisis related to abortion procedures. This myth is one of the various ways that supporters of unlimited abortion keep uninformed observers in the dark about what would really happen if Roe were overturned and voters once again had some control over our abortion policy.
But even a Planned Parenthood leader acknowledged this in 1960. Dr. Mary Calderone, the medical director of Planned Parenthood, wrote in the American Journal of Public Health:
“… about 90 percent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians…Whatever trouble arises usually arises from self-induced abortions, which comprise approximately 8 percent, or with the very small percentage that go to some kind of non-medical abortionist…So remember…abortion, whether therapeutic or illegal, is in the main no longer dangerous, because it is being done well by physicians.”
Government statistic prior to Roe confirm Calderone’s statements. A 1972 Center for Disease Control report noted the maternal death rate from abortions was 39 in the United States, the year prior to Roe.
A founder of the pro-abortion group NARAL also later admitted that their claims about thousands of women dying from unsafe abortions every year was “totally false.”
This is not the only lie that the abortion industry tells. Recently, a pro-abortion researcher at UC San Francisco also admitted that making abortions illegal does prevent them from happening. Abortion activists frequently claim that making abortions illegal will not stop them from happening, it only will drive women to the back alleys. But Diana Greene Foster, a well-respected researcher in the pro-abortion movement, said it is just not true.
Though the Washington Post tends to have a liberal, pro-abortion bias, its fact-checker has exposed Planned Parenthood’s lies several times in recent years and affirmed pro-life talking points as true. In 2017, for example, the Post confirmed pro-life advocates’ statement that the United States is only one of seven countries in the world that allows elective abortions after 20 weeks.
All of these add up to huge wins, not merely for the pro-life movement, but for unborn babies, mothers and fathers whose lives, families and futures are at stake.
