Sometimes, the Washington Post fact checkers get things right about abortion, and sometimes they get things very wrong.
This week was a case of the “very wrong” when the newspaper claimed Joe Biden does not support “abortion up until the point of birth.”
Republican National Convention chairwoman Ronna McDaniel made the statement while calling out Biden for adopting a radical pro-abortion position in his run for the presidency, National Review reports.
The Washington Post fact checker slammed McDaniel’s statement as false, writing:
Most abortions are performed in the earlier stages of pregnancy. About 1 percent happen after the fetus reaches the point of viability. In short, McDaniel and the president are describing something that rarely happens and that no Democrat is calling for, anyway.
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and some others who competed in the Democratic presidential primary said they favored having no restrictions on abortion.
Biden does not take such a sweeping position; he supports abortion rights and says he would codify in statute the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade and related precedents.
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But Biden also has said he support abortions without restrictions. In June, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a major abortion case out of Louisiana, Biden responded with his belief in a “woman’s constitutional right to choice under any circumstances.” In other words, he believes a woman should be allowed to abort her unborn baby for any reason, at any time, and any time includes up to birth.
Another indication of his support for unrestricted abortion on demand, Biden also said he wants to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law. The infamous abortion ruling allows abortions for basically any reason through all nine months of pregnancy. Some states, including Colorado and New Mexico, still allow abortions without restriction, and abortionists there openly advertise late-term abortions in the third trimester.
Back in 2017, the Washington Post’s own fact checkers confirmed that, because of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. is one of only seven countries in the world to allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“We should note that some of the seven countries allow abortions after 20 weeks, but ban it after 24 weeks. And other countries have no federal limits, but legislate at the state or provincial level, similar to the United States,” fact checker Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote at the time (emphasis added).
But the fact checkers for the new piece, Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, ignored this and relied instead on a statement by Katie L. Watson, a professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, to make their claim.
“‘Abortion until the moment of birth’ does not exist — it’s a boogeyman abortion opponents have created to frighten voters and derail rational conversation about constitutional rights,” Watson told the newspaper. “Nobody ‘supports’ it, and nobody does it. No patient ever asks a physician to end her pregnancy ‘the moment before birth,’ and no physician would agree to do it.”
But it’s just not true. Stories of babies who survived abortions indicate that late-term unborn babies are sometimes aborted and doctors agree to do it. And doctors and nurses, infamously including Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, have admitted that, if these late-term babies are born alive, they are sometimes left to die without medical treatment.
Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, voted against a bill that would have ensured late-term babies who survive abortions receive basic medical care.
Thousands of viable, late-term unborn babies are aborted in the U.S. every year. Based on Centers for Disease Control numbers, the estimate is about 8,000; however, the CDC report does not include data from every state and the number is almost certainly higher.
What’s more, respected pro-abortion leaders admit that most late-term abortions are not done because of health problems with the mother or unborn baby. Most are purely elective.
The new Democratic Party platform is extreme on abortion, and Biden is just as extreme. Though the mainstream media is trying to portray him as a moderate, there is nothing middle-of-the-road about his support for unrestricted abortion-on-demand or his plans to force taxpayers to pay for them.
