By Dave Andrusko

Dr. Leana Wen

We wrote about this twice last week, but the subject matter is so important I wanted to revisit it again today. Why so significant? Because it is not often that “Fact Checkers” actually check the ‘facts’ that pro-abortionist circulate as if they are immutable truth.

The Washington Post’s principal Fact-Checker, Glen Kessler, just hammered Planned Parenthood for once again distorting the true number of women who died prior to Roe v. Wade. New president, Dr. Leanna Wen, trotted out the tried and untrue assertion that “thousands” of women died before Justice Harry Blackmun came to their rescue with his opinions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.

Kessler gave Dr. Wen “Four Pinocchios” for thrice peddling patently unsubstantiated claims that “thousands” of women died prior to 1973. [Pro-abortionists often allege 5,000, but evidently Wen balked at his nonsensical statement.]

“The problem with Wen’s claim is that is derived from data that is decades old,” Kessler wrote by way of an early summary. In truth, as Kessler is too kind to point out directly, the claim was based on data that was inadequate when it was accumulated and patently absurd in retrospect.

Would you expect Wen to be woman enough to own up by personally addressing Kessler on her Twitter account? I suppose not but still….

Anyway in lieu of that, Wen re-tweeted posts from Sandro Galea

that are rife with the kind of misinformation that Kessler critiqued.

For example, Dr. Galea links back to a Guttmacher study from 2003. Galea tweets, “The number of yearly deaths could well have been in the thousands. A @Guttmacher report contains data indicating that in 1930 abortion was named as the cause of death for nearly 2,700 women.”

I cannot find a link in the Guttmacher study to back up their claim that in 1930 “abortion was the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women.” But the point is not what was the number of abortion-related deaths in 1930. It is rather what the numbers were leading up to 1973 when Roe was decided.

Remember this is all in the context of what happens if Roe v. Wade should fall. Wen asserted on March 6, “We face a real situation where Roe could be overturned. And we know what will happen, which is that women will die. Thousands of women died every year pre-Roe.”

The same Guttmacher study Galea links in the tweet Dr. Wen reposted says the number of abortion deaths had dropped to 1,700 by 1940 “and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200”—not the “thousands” that Wen demagogues.

When Kessler went to Planned Parenthood for backup for Wen’s assertion, they directed him to a 2014 policy statement from the abortion-happy American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

In a devastating critique, Kessler wrote

There is no citation in the statement for the estimate of “as many as 5,000 annual deaths,” even though many of the other sentences are carefully documented. None of the citations around this sentence supports the figure, and there is no explanation about how it was calculated.

Pro-abortionists aren’t big on citations when they are peddling one of their favorite Big Lies.

In explaining his “ Four Pinocchios” [“whopper” status] designation Kessler concluded

Wen is a doctor, and the ACOG is made up of doctors. They should know better than to peddle statistics based on data that predates the advent of antibiotics. Even given the fuzzy nature of the data and estimates, there is no evidence that in the years immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s decision, thousands of women died every year in the United States from illegal abortions. Wen’s repeated use of this number reminds us of the shoddy data used by human trafficking opponents. Unsafe abortion is certainly a serious issue, especially in countries with inadequate medical facilities. But advocates hurt their cause when they use figures that do not withstand scrutiny. These numbers were debunked in 1969 — 50 years ago — by a statistician celebrated by Planned Parenthood. There’s no reason to use them today.

These people are shameless.