In the weeks since President Trump’s State of the Union Address, pro-abortion media have run wild with “fact check” pieces rating President Trump’s comments as “false.” A closer look at the claims of the “fact-checkers” reveals more about the abortion supporters than about the President’s truthful and accurate remarks.
In his State of the Union address earlier this month, President Trump spoke harshly about the radical abortion laws threatening innocent human Life. He said,
There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than chilling displays our nation saw in recent days. Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth. These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and their dreams with the world.
New York’s radical abortion laws allow abortion at any stage of pregnancy if the abortionist determines the mother’s “health” is at risk (a term so loosely defined that virtually anything could qualify), allows people who are not doctors to commit abortions, and removes all protections for babies born alive in an attempted abortion. Other pro-abortion states are following New York in promoting similarly barbaric anti-Life laws.
The response of pro-abortion commentators to the President’s remarks are telling. CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, and NPR all go to great lengths to show the President’s remarks were “false” without succeeding in finding anything.
These news outlets with a notorious anti-Life bias on abortion ignore the broad and undefined nature of the “health” exception, which dates back to Doe v. Bolton, and does, in fact, mean abortion is allowed in virtually all circumstances. The Supreme Court decision states that abortion can be considered “necessary” by the abortionist “in the light of all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age – relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.” Ignoring the actual implications of the law is a grave misrepresentation calculated to advance pro-abortion views on the part of these news organizations.
The pro-abortion “fact-checkers” also made much of the statistics showing that most abortions occur early in pregnancy. This does not affect the injustice of late-term abortion, and this statistic is not a counter-argument. Every abortion takes an innocent human Life, but abortions that occur after a child is highly developed and even able to live on her own outside the womb are particularly shocking to most people, and even most abortion supporters oppose late-term abortions.
Each year in the United States, there are roughly one million abortions. As Live Action has reported, each year more than 100,000 of those abortions were committed in the second and third trimester. Nonetheless, the fact-checkers frequently quote the CDC statistic from 2015 that “only” 8,296 preborn babies were killed in extremely late-term abortions, a fact that would alarm most of the American public.
Several anti-Life news outlets also brought in “experts” to make the argument that “late-term abortion” does not exist. This is farcical. Abortion supporters tried this tactic when Pro-Life lawmakers successfully advanced the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which prohibits a particularly gruesome form of late-term abortion. In the anti-Life Netflix documentary Reversing Roe, a pro-abortion lawyer claims, “There’s no such thing as partial-birth abortion,” because abortionists do not call the procedure by that name.
This is a purely semantic argument. Of course, Americans do not care what abortionists call the procedure, they care about the violent destruction of innocent human Life. The same can be said of late-term abortion. The killing of preborn babies late in pregnancy does occur, most immediately obvious from the fact that abortion supporters are insisting that keeping these killings legal is “necessary.”
President Trump’s description of a baby being ripped from the womb moments before birth drew ire from abortion activists, and several of the “fact-check” pieces trotted out doctors to say that this scenario is highly unlikely. In this admission, the pro-abortion pundits reveal something important about late-term abortion: in the event of a life-threatening emergency during the late stages of pregnancy, doctors do not rely on abortion to save the mother’s life. By the late stages of pregnancy, the child is so large that the abortion is a multi-day procedure. A true emergency would require immediate intervention in the form of the premature delivery of a living baby, not the slow and violent destruction of a child followed by the delivery of a dead baby.
Do not be deceived by the extreme anti-Life bias of the mainstream “fact-checkers.” President Trump’s defense of Life was accurate and necessary. In Texas, the law protects pain-capable preborn babies after 20 weeks’ gestation, but there is still much that remains to be done to protect the preborn in our state.
Texas Right to Life’s abortion fact sheet shows the truth about abortion in Texas. As the recent debacle over President Trump’s Pro-Life remarks shows, we cannot rely on the mainstream media to give accurate information about abortion. The Pro-Life movement must accept the responsibility of staying informed on Life issues.