Define Conservatives vs. Liberals

Thursday, May 26, 2005

False Claims On Abortion By Democrats 

I received an email today from my good friends at the GOP (a friend of mine signed me up as a joke) about some misinformation the Dems have been spreading around.

Mr. Rexrode explains that the Dems have been spreading false claims about the rate of abortions over GWB's time in office. This claim by the GOP is based on a FactCheck.org study published May 25th, 2005 (and modified on May 26th).

Notice below how Mr. Rexrode mentions that Howard Dean made this "false claim" as recently as this past Sunday. Now glance over at your calendar and note the date on Sunday (Okay, I'll save you the work. It was the 22nd). How can one make false claims about something that was believed to be true until 3 days later?

By actually reading the factcheck.org column, it also becomes clear that Senators Kerry and Clinton were both relying on now discredited data.

So here's the test. Now that new information has come to light, will Dems like Kerry, Dean, and Clinton continue to repeat the now debunked abortion statistics? I doubt it.

Compare that to the White House's constant repetition of debunked information about WMDs, social security insolvency, or pollution, and you start to see where the real and truly damaging false claims are coming from.

Abortions rising under Bush? Not true. How that false claim came to be -and lives on.

"Recently, some Democrats are falsely claiming that abortions have increased during President Bush's time in office. Not true. As this recent article from FactCheck.org points out, abortions have fallen under the Bush Administration.

FactCheck debunks the claim, made most recently by Howard Dean this past Sunday, and by Sens. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry in recent statements.

The report indicates those eager to criticize President Bush picked up on a claim based on incomplete and inaccurate data:

This claim is false. It's based on an an opinion piece that used data from only 16 states. A study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of 43 states found that abortions have actually decreased... The claim that abortions are rising again can be traced back to an opinion piece by Glen Harold Stassen, an ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary... Stassen's broad conclusion wasn't justified by the sketchy information he cited, however. Furthermore, a primary organization he cited specifically as a source for historical data now contradicts him, saying abortions have continued to decline since Bush took office."