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Round Two: Fact-Checking Another Common Media Talking Point on Abortion

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  September 21, 2023 1:15 PM

Let's return to this critique of Kristen Welker's abortion exchange with Donald Trump in her debut as Meet the Press anchor.  I offered a mixed review of the former president's responses, focusing much of my critique on Welker, whose questions and real time 'fact checks' were biased and misleading.  Having covered most of the important ground already, I want to revisit one particular point.  Welker dismissed late-term abortion as very rare, stating that "only 1% of late-term abortions happen, and always in the state of crisis."  This is a version of a pro-abortion-rights talking point that minimizes the frequency and barbarity of such life-terminating procedures.  

As a counter-point, I included this perspective:


Let's dig into this a little more.  Welker, echoing Couric and other abortion-supporting media figures, pretends that elective late-term abortions don't really happen in America.  'Only' around one percent of abortions happen late in pregnancy, they say (which still leaves 10,000 or more each year), at least implying that those rare exceptions exclusively occur around crises such as a mother's life being at risk, or the baby being non-viable.  That's incorrect.  Journalist Tim Carney reports:

It is a commonly held and oft-expressed opinion that abortions of babies after 20 weeks occur only when the unborn baby has been diagnosed with a fatal condition or severe disability or when continuing the pregnancy poses a severe threat to the mother’s life. This view is not bolstered by the available evidence...Many in the news media often use vague terminology, pointing out that many second- or third-trimester abortions happen because of a severe health problem for the baby or the mother, thus implying that all late abortions are such cases. There is no evidence for this view. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that elective late-term abortions happen every day in the United States. The most thorough database of abortion in the U.S. is kept by the Guttmacher Institute, affiliated with Planned Parenthood. Guttmacher does not make its data open, meaning we get only the statistics Guttmacher wants to give. But from the available evidence, all presented by defenders of abortion, it seems clear that many abortions after 20 weeks happen without any dire diagnoses for the mother or baby.

Diana Greene Foster, a fierce defender of abortion, estimated in 2013 that “more than 15,000 [abortions] likely take place after 20 weeks.” Foster and co-author Katrina Kimport published a paper titled “Who Seeks Abortions at or After 20 Weeks.” They wrote in their paper, “Data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” (The authors later retracted this sentence after abortion opponents began citing it.) Working together with abortion clinics, Foster and Kimport, in an earlier study, recruited mothers who had obtained or sought abortions and repeatedly interviewed them over five years. The authors state that they “exclu[ded] women who sought later abortions on grounds of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” That means these researchers, contacting a small selection of abortion clinics, found hundreds of willing interviewees who had elective late-term abortions in a three-year period... In 2005, Guttmacher published a paper, “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions,” which found that 1 in 5 women having abortions after the first trimester cited any concern about fetal or health.

The retracted sentence is quite a tell.  They reported something truthfully heinous, then the wrong people noticed, so they scrubbed it.  This is a good observation:


Sometimes, the truth about the abortion lobby is so deeply grotesque that they actually benefit from their own radicalism because normal people simply can't bring themselves to believe that certain evils occur, and don't want to contemplate the possibility that they do.  Carney's work demonstrates that there are likely thousands of annual, elective, late-term abortions in America.  Welker asserted, in response to Trump, that "no one" is arguing for such a policy. "That’s not a part of anyone’s argument," she said.  But it's the national Democrats' actual policy, as borne out over the last half-decade of actual votes.  Here's an idea that should further clarify matters: They insist that late-term abortions basically never occur -- and when they do, it's to save the life of the mother, or because of a catastrophic medical condition rendering the child non-viable.  If that's the case, will they support a ban of elective abortions after 20 weeks (only a  small handful of countries allow abortions past this point), with exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother, or a non-viable baby?  

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That should be an easy compromise that nearly everyone could agree to, right?  If such abortions never take place, then codifying the status quo wouldn't matter.  And if "no one" supports such abortions, they should be easy to bar, with the aforementioned exceptions.  Given their voting record in recent years, I'd be willing to bet that 95 percent or more of Congressional Democrats would vote against such a measure.  Because, again, abortion-on-demand for nine months, for any reason, paid for by taxpayers, is their actual position, no matter how much water the "news" media carries on their behalf.  To drive this disturbing reality home another way, here are clips of two pro-abortion Democratic politicians -- one a leftist governor of a very blue state, the other a failed 'moderate' Democrat from a red state who used to claim a pro-life worldview -- refusing to identify any cut-off or limitation for legalized abortion:


This is the position of their party, also recently underscored in comments from the Vice President. Certain journalists refusing to acknowledge it is complicity in activism.