PolitiFact’s Gardner Selby tells us Ted Cruz recently “stirred” an Austin crowd at the Texas Tribune Festival by factually describing Hillary Clinton’s position as favoring “abortion without limit.” PolitiFact, in fact, rates Cruz’s assertion is completely “false.” We give PolitiFact a flaming giant liar rating on the Truth-O-Gauge.
Actually, it’s unclear to us if Cruz’s assertions are even pretend-debunked in this piece. To be precise, Cruz said Clinton “supports unlimited abortion on demand up until the moment of birth, including partial-birth abortion, with taxpayer funding.” Even when we set aside the hyper-literalism PolitiFact selectively deploys when shielding its favorite politicians, this statement is accurate.
For starters, this is one of those “fact checks” that’s not only biased by omission but by inclusion. Why, for instance, did we need to know the percentage of women getting late-term abortions? Does PolitiFact offer a similar graph of the percentage of American gun owners who use their weapons to murder when “fact checking” the president’s statements on firearms? Of course not. This is deployed to create the impression that Cruz was somehow misleading you. He wasn’t.
But if this aspect of abortion is worth exploring — without dissembling — it’s probably worth mentioning that around 10,000 viable babies are disposed of every year. So whether it’s 0.0002 or 50 percent of all abortions, it’s still 10,000 babies aborted late-term.
Hillary, like most elected Democrats these days, supports legal abortion on demand to the moment of crowning as long as the woman has huddled with her physician and family members and decided the fetus is not a human being but a superfluous appendage. As it turns out, this is still not a popular position with the American people, so institutions like PolitiFact are very sensitive when people point it out.
We concede, PolitiFact, that Hillary doesn’t personally recommend that every single American obtain abortions at crowning. But Hillary certainly doesn’t oppose the practice if a woman chooses it. The hundreds of words expended explain her stated position on “exceptions” doesn’t change the fact that exemptions are no more than an inconvenience for women who want to procure an abortion at any stage of their pregnancies.
PolitiFact points out that Hillary told Fox News’ Brett Baier not long ago, “I object to the recent effort in Congress to pass a law saying after 20 weeks, you know, no such exceptions, because although these are rare, Brett, they sometimes arise in the most complex, difficult medical situation.”
Yes, sometimes. Mostly not. In any event, not only do these comments prove Cruz’s claim about Hillary’s support for unlimited late-term abortions, but it reminds you that a genuine truth-seeking outfit would do a patent deep-dive fact-check on her misleading assertions.
The pro-life Charlotte-Lozier Institute argues that both medical literature and late-term abortion providers show the majority of late-term procedures are not performed for “maternal health complications or lethal fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancy.” Even the propagandists at the Planned Parenthood spun-off Guttmacher Institute found — in the only study on the attitudes of women who get late-term abortions — that in “many ways, women who had later abortions were similar to those who obtained first-trimester procedures.”
Here’s another zero-Pinocchio fact: Hillary already fully supports taxpayer funding of abortion. It’s worth repeating: anyone who funds Planned Parenthood is subsidizing abortions. Every dollar handed to that organization for women’s health is a dollar freed up to support and promote its biggest moneymaker. I’m sorry, your enlightened position doesn’t alter the rules of currency, fungibility, or science.
Moreover, Hillary supports doing away with the Hyde Amendment, a law — a rider, really — that prohibits Medicaid funding for abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. It does not feature the do-what-you-want exception, so Democrats’ platform now includes the goal of forcing taxpayers to fund all abortions. I honestly can’t decipher PolitiFact’s meandering explanation for why Hillary’s position shouldn’t be considered “taxpayer funding.”
Guttmacher estimates that 33,000 more unborn will be eliminated every year if the Hyde Amendment is rescinded — an expansion paid for, as Ted Cruz correctly pointed out, through taxpayer funding. Consider the source, and you can imagine the number will be far higher. It’s also worth mentioning that Medicaid is not the only welfare program that would then be funding abortions. (And we won’t even get into the fact that Obamacare, which Hillary, naturally, supports also funds elective abortions. A 2013 audit by Government Accountability Office found that 1,036 exchange plans featured abortion in their coverage.)
So the old Clinton mantra of “safe, legal, and rare” has now transformed into “sorta-safe, always legal, and tax-sponsored.” Yet PolitiFact’s promise to help you find “the truth” remains complete rubbish.
