Hillary Clinton Isn’t Entitled to Her Own Facts on Abortion

October 26th, 2016 2:04 PM

There is no pro-abortion policy too extreme for Hillary Clinton. She may express some sorrow over late term abortions, as she did in the third presidential debate, but there appears to be no limit on abortion that she would actually support. As the champion of the Democrat platform, and after all of her years in and around government, all available evidence suggests that she supports the pro-abortion party line: a) tax-funded, b) 40th week abortions performed c) for the purpose of sex selection, d) by a Catholic doctor against her conscience, e) in a Catholic hospital compelled by the government, f) after the mother was directed there by a pro-life pregnancy resource center forced to refer women for abortions.

She obscures her extreme agenda in part through the complicity of the media. Politifact, to pick on the obvious example, is often willing to whitewash even her most extreme pro-abortion views. Even while acknowledging that Clinton voted against the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, Politifact was sure to cite that her objections to the bill were due to the lack of exceptions included to protect the health of the woman. However, as stated by The Federalist’s David Harsanyi, this fact check was “not only biased by omission but by inclusion”: Politifact’s fact check included numbers overstating the low percentage of abortion, but not the complete headcount—approximately 10,000 viable babies aborted through “rare” late term abortions.

In the last presidential debate, Clinton made at least two (I’m being generous) abortion claims that are patently false or intentionally misleading and deserve follow up from a skeptical press.

Partial-birth abortion isn’t necessary

As a Senator, Hillary Clinton voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion, a grizzly procedure in which the child — usually late in pregnancy — is partly delivered before having its head crushed and its brain sucked out to make it easier to remove. In the third debate she defended partial-birth abortion, saying that abortion regulations must take “the life and the health of the mother … into account.” The implication is that the federal partial-birth abortion ban she opposed (and that was upheld by the Supreme Court) failed to do so.

That’s nonsense, but in fact we need not speculate about whether partial-birth abortion is necessary to save the mother. The federal partial-birth abortion ban expressly provides an exception for the life of the mother. So if such an incredibly unlikely circumstance actually arises, the law already permits the procedure.

It is true that the partial-birth abortion ban act also not include a “health” exception. Congress chose not to do so after holding hearings and determining that this gruesome procedure was never necessary to protect a mother’s health. But perhaps it has escaped Ms. Clinton’s, and the media’s, notice that the Supreme Court invited a challenge to the partial-birth abortion ban in an actual case where a woman’s health required the procedure. Justice Ginsburg, believing the claims of abortion advocates — as Hillary Clinton clearly does — that partial-birth abortions are performed entirely for this purpose, predicted such challenges “will be mounted swiftly, to ward off serious, sometimes irremediable harm, to women whose health would be endangered by the [partial-birth abortion] prohibition.”

Except it has never happened. 3,477 days have passed since the partial-birth abortion ban was upheld. Taking as true the abortion industry’s own claims that 6 such procedures happened per day, nearly 21,000 partial-birth abortions have been outlawed that would have otherwise occurred. And yet Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the ACLU and their allies have failed to identify a single instance where a mother’s health was threatened and a partial-birth abortion was necessary. In light of 9 years of evidence, with more added daily, it is now evident that Congress got it right and Hillary Clinton and the abortion industry got it wrong.

Hillary isn’t entitled to her own facts about the supposed “health” need for partial-birth abortion and it’s the media’s responsibility to hold her accountable. 

Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms

Like many politicians before her, Clinton has defended the compulsory relationship between taxpayers and Planned Parenthood by claiming that it performs “cancer screenings.” This is, of course, a shrill dog whistle for “mammograms.” The listener is supposed to imagine a Planned Parenthood facility with trained doctors in white lab coats performing free mammograms for low-income women.

But Planned Parenthood doesn’t even own a single mammogram machine. The old adage is that you can’t prove a negative. But federal law expressly requires a license to operate a mammogram machine, and Planned Parenthood has no license. Of course, that has not stopped politicians in the past — and Cecile Richards herself – from claiming that Planned Parenthood was performing mammograms. But any time a politician suggests that Planned Parenthood performs mammograms, they are accusing the abortion business of violating a federal women’s health law, the Mammogram Quality Standards Act.

Last year, Planned Parenthood officials even conceded that they do not perform mammograms. But that doesn’t stop the group’s political friends like Hillary Clinton from defending its abortion business by trying to distract you with mirages of free mammograms.

The Democratic party’s abortion stance has shifted dramatically toward the left. With the party’s new platform support for repealing the Hyde Amendment this year, it is hard to imagine how the Democratic party could take a more extreme position on abortion. Hillary Clinton is the natural standard-bearer for this radical abortion view, having aggressively supported these same policies throughout her career.

A great majority of the American people oppose late term abortion and taxpayer funding of abortionists. Hillary Clinton takes a far more radical view. She is entitled to her extreme pro-abortion views. But she isn’t entitled to her own facts.