That totally unbiased fact-checking site PolitiFact that Facebook employed to help rid the world of “fake news” just declared that the killing of unborn babies in abortion is a “disputed” fact.
That is some epic “fake news” right there.
PolitiFact used its platform to attack GOP congressional candidate Jason Isaac in Texas for telling a League of Women Voters guide that he “will work to end abortion, which is the leading cause of death for black Americans and kills as many as 1,000 black children every day.”
Even though in cities like New York more black babies are aborted than born (a fact, ironically, that the site labeled “True“), PolitiFact smugly labeled Isaac’s patently-true (and scientifically-accurate) statement “Mostly False.”
According to PolitiFact Texas analyst W. Gardner Selby, “Isaac’s characterization of abortions as killing babies is disputed.” He then goes to quote several sources, all of which are biased and are indifferent to what abortion actually does, to say abortion does not kill:
Abortion rights advocates, noting the Supreme Court legalized abortion in every state in 1973, typically refer to unborn fetuses. Also, the CDC doesn’t say abortions kill babies; it defines a “legal induced abortion” as “an intervention performed by a licensed clinician (e.g., a physician, nurse-midwife, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant) that is intended to terminate an ongoing pregnancy.” In addition, an unknown share of aborted pregnancies wouldn’t have resulted in live children, due to the natural risk of miscarriages and stillbirths.
That would basically be like citing the Supreme Court decision Dred Scott to say that black people being human is a “disputed” fact.
As to the number of blacks killed in abortion as opposed to other causes of death, Selby has nowhere to go with that one. According to the CDC, the leading cause of death for black Americans in 2014 was heart disease (75,249). Big number, for sure, but compare that to the number of black abortions provided by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (founded by Planned Parenthood), estimating that over 250,000 black babies die in abortion per year.
Opinions about this claim likely divide over Isaac’s definition of a fetus as a child — and by Isaac’s reasoning, we find this claim has an element of truth in that black women in 2014 accounted for about 711 U.S. abortions a day.
In fact, however, heart disease was the leading cause of death for black and other Americans in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency didn’t list the abortion procedure among causes of death.
We rate this claim Mostly False.