WashPost Fact Checker Can't Handle Trump's Truth About Late-Term Abortions

mrcNewsbusters ^ | April 29, 2020 | Tim Graham

[Morgana]

The Washington Post “Fact Checker” has a very strange and unfactual way of reacting to Democrats telling voters and interest groups they want no restrictions on abortion. They think it’s a “lie” to say these Democrats support abortion up until birth. They gave three “Pinocchios” [mostly false] for this statement:

Virtually every Democrat candidate has declared their unlimited support for extreme late-term abortion, ripping babies straight from the mother’s womb, right up until the very moment of birth.” — President Trump, at a campaign rally in Charlotte, March 2, 2020

Salvador Rizzo is doing this “fact check” on April 28, so what takes two months about this sentence? This, for any Democrat saying “no restrictions,” has philosophical and scientific accuracy. Until a baby is born, women have an unrestricted “right to choose” to abort the baby.

But Rizzo wants to be cute about this and say this is “false”:

We keep adding it to our database of everything false or misleading from Trump, but the claim is so visceral and deceptive that it deserves its own fact check.

Most abortions are performed in the earlier stages of pregnancy. About 1 percent happen after the fetus reaches the point of viability. In short, the president is describing something that rarely happens and that no Democrat is calling for anyway.

This is not a refutation of Trump’s point. It’s changing the subject. If I said it’s allowable to file your taxes until April 15, it’s not proven wrong if 98 percent of taxpayers filed in February. The deadline still stands. If one percent of abortions are after viability, and the Centers for Disease Control reported more than 623,000 abortions in 2016, then that's more than 6,200 late abortions.

Then there’s the whole game of: just because I said a woman is free to choose abortion at eight months and two weeks, it doesn’t mean I’m “calling for it.”

Rizzo now says this claim of Trump is outdated because although Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “said they favored no restrictions on abortion,” the apparent nominee Joe Biden says he would codify Roe vs. Wade, which has a trimester framework.

Rizzo at least let the pro-life side explain its case:

Steven H. Aden, chief legal officer at Americans United for Life, said Trump’s remark was accurate because Democrats as a party favor abortion rights, and restrictions on abortion can be avoided through legal loopholes.

“In a companion case to Roe, Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court defined the ‘health exception’ in a wide-open fashion, allowing for ‘familial,’ ‘economic’ and ‘emotional’ considerations,” Aden wrote in an email. “This completely subjective ‘health exception’ is what gave us the ‘abortion on demand’ regime we’ve had since Roe."

Rizzo’s Pinocchio-justifying conclusion is just silly:

The statistics hardly justify Trump’s description of babies being ripped from the womb — a horror story he has repeated dozens of times. About 1 percent of abortions happen after the point of viability, so the cases at issue in this debate would be relatively rare.

Trump also grossly exaggerated. Supporting abortion rights is not the same as supporting abortions.

This is a bit meaningless, like "Just because I support the right to polygamy doesn't mean I support polygamy." Rizzo also quoted a pro-abortion expert to support his view:

Trump’s attack line was seriously flawed, some experts said. That some Democrats support abortion rights doesn’t mean they support “extreme late-term abortions.”

“That’s like saying everyone who ‘supports’ the Second Amendment ‘supports’ school shootings,” Katie L. Watson, a professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, wrote in an email.

This is a "fact check"? People can support the Second Amendment and still oppose school shootings as a violent crime. Abortion supporters believe in killing the unborn as the precious right for women.

This Washington Post fact check is rated "Fully Fake" for declaring a true claim to be false. For more see our Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers page.

[richardtavor]

I don’t really pay much attention to the media fact checkers. They are all liars anyway, and why waste my time? If I question it, I will do actual research to find out its veracity.

[MHGinTN]

BOTH po'lie'tical parties have used this evil holocaust for political fodder. Try getting ANY politician to tell the truth if asked the following: since the unborn are alive, and science has proven they can learn at 22 weeks of gestation, why are these alive sensing human beings not protected as Americans? The only honest answer a professional liar can give is that they are not citizens until they are born, fully out of the mother's body ... and even then demon rats want the murderers to have the option to slaughter the born alive innocent AMERICAN CITIZEN to sell their body parts.

The insanity is going to extend to older citizens as soon as the demon rats get back in power to decide who lives and who dies. They have an agenda to segment society into worthy and unworthy, as in a born alive child of God is dispenasible but murderers awaiting execution are more worthy to be exhonerated from death.

[Steely Tom]

“That’s like saying everyone who ‘supports’ the Second Amendment ‘supports’ school shootings,” Katie L. Watson, a professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, wrote in an email.

I believe left-wing Donkeycrats have said exactly that, on more than one occasion.

[edwinland]

“That’s like saying everyone who ‘supports’ the Second Amendment ‘supports’ school shootings,”

OOOOK. Is she saying that abortion supporters don't support partial birth abortion? Which ones?

More specifically, 2nd Amendment supporters believe that school shootings should be illegal (oh -- and they are). Do abortion supporters believe that partial birth abortion should be illegal?

In fact, other than that blatant dissembling, her analogy is spot on. Abortion is quite a bit like school shooting -- with the victims in both cases being completely innocent children.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Supporting abortion rights is not the same as supporting abortions.

Yes. It is.

Sorry, you can wash your hands all you wish but supporting abortion rights is supporting killing human babies.

Now you may like some try to squirm out of it by saying that you are "uncomfortable" with killing human babies but reality is that you support it.

And no, I am not going to cut you any slack. Because, you support killing human babies.

[MrChips]

I agree. The whole falsehood by legislators of “I don’t support abortion but I won’t tell a woman what to do” is hogwash. One fights for what one believes. If you really think it’s murder, you don’t stand idly by and let it happen.

[MrChips]

He says Biden wants to “codify” Roe vs. Wade as if that meant Biden wants to moderate it, restrict it. But the word “codify” simply means “cement into law.” Roe is often called “settled law,” but it is really just a Supreme Court decision about legality. It has never been signed into law as a piece of legislation. So, Biden would make it more permanent and, thus, far worse, through it’s codification.

[combat_boots]

Goya went nuts

Here’s one of his paintings from that time

In person, it’s ghastly

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/RrUAAOSw3KFWd92X/s-l300.jpg

[Luke21]

Media and fact check is a contradiction. They didn’t fact check Politico’s story about Chinese banks or the woman who gave her husband fish tank cleaner. So it’s just another bunch of bogus lies by Democrat hacks.

[seowulf]

Democrat: I believe that all prison doors should be opened and all prisoners allowed to go free, but murderers should choose to stay in prison.