WaPo fact checker, Glenn Kessler, just gave Planned Parenthood four Pinocchios for their claim that before abortion was legal, 5,000 women a year died from botched abortions.
Four Pinocchios is the most untruthful statement a fact check can find. That 5,000 number was debunked over 50 years ago, but Planned Parenthood like all liberals never lets a small detail like that get in the way. Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen has been lying through her teeth on this one for months. Her motto is “Never let the truth interfere with a crappy story.”
But, you have to understand, if Planned Parenthood was forced to be honest, they would probably be out of business.
“We face a real situation where Roe could be overturned,” she said in a March interviewcited by the fact check. “And we know what will happen, which is that women will die. Thousands of women died every year pre-Roe.” (RELATED: MSNBC Host Lobs Softballs At Planned Parenthood President)
Planned Parenthood told WaPo it got the claim from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which said in a 2014 policy statement that 1.2 million women had abortions each year prior to 1973, and “unsafe abortions caused as many as 5,000 annual deaths.” The ACOG was unable to provide any supporting documentation for the 5,000 number, but WaPo figured out where it came from based on another report provided by Planned Parenthood.
The figure evidently comes from a 1963 study based on very rough estimates that were revised several times after the researcher concluded his estimate was too high. Planned Parenthood’s own former medical director wrote in 1959 that abortion was no longer a very dangerous procedure because of the advent of antibiotics and the fact that most of the abortions were done by trained doctors.
The fact check found that the CDC recorded just 24 deaths from illegal abortions in 1972, the year before Roe when it began collecting data, and recorded only 39 for the following year.