The fact checker PolitiFact attempted to debunk a comment by former Vice President Mike Pence that exposed how extreme many American states’ abortion laws are compared to the rest of the world.
But what the pro-life Republican leader said was true, and other fact checkers have confirmed it.
“The fact is, today abortion law in the United States is more aligned with China and North Korea than with western nations in Europe,” Pence said June 23 during the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington, D.C. He recently announced his campaign to run for president.
Pence was right. For nearly 50 years under Roe v. Wade, states were forced to legalize abortion on demand up to viability and allowed to legalize abortions for any reason up to birth. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling made the United States one of only seven countries in the world to allow elective abortions after 20 weeks – a fact confirmed by the Washington Post and others.
Even now that Roe is gone, about half of the states still allow elective abortions until an unborn baby is viable.
However, PolitiFact argued that Pence’s statement was “mostly false” in its analysis last week. According to the article, he oversimplified “a complex web of global abortion laws,” and because North Korea and China appear to be thinking about changing their abortion laws – even though they do not appear to actually have done so – his comment is “outdated.”
Follow LifeNews on the MeWe social media network for the latest pro-life news free from Facebook’s censorship!
The fact checker also conflated abortion access with “abortion laws,” his actual statement, to argue that while many “western European countries have stricter gestational limits for ‘elective’ abortions than some U.S. states,” Pence is still wrong. It claimed that “… abortion access is often easier for many women in some of those countries” because they allow taxpayer-funded abortions and “far-reaching exceptions that include mental health and income.”
Pence’s comment was a broad one and every country has different laws about abortion, but generally he was correct about the United States, China, North Korea and Europe.
The U.S., China, North Korea, Canada and a few other countries are unique and extreme in allowing unborn babies to be aborted for any reason up to birth. Meanwhile, most European countries limit abortions after 12 to 15 weeks of pregnancy, and a few, including Poland and Malta, ban almost all elective abortions.
Even PolitiFact acknowledged that “gestational limits for elective abortions are stricter” in many European countries than in many American states. Currently, 15 states ban or strictly limit abortions; and several more are fighting in court to enforce their pro-life laws. But others, including Colorado, Maryland and Washington, D.C., allow abortions up to birth, and others, such as Maine, Illinois and New York, allow broad “health exceptions” in the third trimester that basically allow abortion on demand throughout pregnancy.
The same is true of China and North Korea. Although both countries are less open publicly about their laws, it is generally understood that they allow unborn babies to be aborted for basically any reason up to birth.
Politifact claimed “that the reports supporting Pence’s characterization are outdated” and the two Asian countries’ pro-abortion “policies appear to be shifting.” But the fact checker also acknowledged that “China so far hasn’t changed the law to halt abortions” and North Korea is too private about its politics to tell if there have been any changes there. In other words, it could not find any proof that Pence was wrong about their laws.
Meanwhile, the fact checker made a questionable claim of its own, one not backed by evidence. PolitiFact asserted that abortions after 21 weeks in the U.S. “usually [are] for urgent medical reasons, including severe maternal or fetal complications.” LifeNews could not find a citation for this claim, but research and statements by abortionists themselves indicate this is false.
One study from ANSIRH, a pro-abortion research group at the University of California, found that women have third-trimester abortions for a number of reasons, including difficulty obtaining an abortion, the inability to afford an abortion earlier, failure to realize she was pregnant earlier, and medical problems with the unborn baby. None of the abortions in the study were because of medical problems with the mother, according to Live Action News, which first reported about the research.
One woman told researchers that she had a third-trimester abortion after her ex-boyfriend got a bonus at work; she had not been able to afford one earlier, according to the report.
Late-term abortionist Warren Hern of Colorado also admitted to doing elective, late-term abortions in an interview with The Atlantic in May. Hern told the magazine that he only does second- and third-trimester abortions now, and estimated more than half of the cases involve healthy mothers carrying healthy babies.
The truth is American abortion laws have been extreme for decades, and polls consistently show Americans oppose such extreme pro-abortion allowances. Most Americans recognize that, by the end of the first trimester, if not sooner, babies in the womb are valuable human beings who deserve to be protected.
