NBC News: ‘Elective Abortions Do Not Occur Up Until Moment of Birth’

Jane Timm of NBC News decided the best way to counter Vice President Mike Pence’s statement that Joe Biden “supports taxpayer funding of abortion right up to the moment of birth” is to claim such abortions never happen.

In her “fact check” of Pence’s address at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Wednesday night, Timm wrote, “Elective abortions do not occur ‘up until the moment of birth.'”

“Just 1.2 percent occur after 21 weeks of gestation, according to the latest data,” she added.

“Apparently, the Democrats’ only solution for their platform’s unpopularity is to say the other side is lying about it,” Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council Action, wrote Thursday.

Observing Timm’s “fact check,” Perkins added, “NBC didn’t just stop with calling [Pence’s statement] false — but the entire notion of late-term abortion!”

The family and faith leader continued that Timm’s claim “elective abortions do not occur ‘up until the moment of birth’ is a lie so outrageous you have to wonder how the media manages even 13 percent credibility in this country.”

He explained:

Believe it or not, 22 states — almost half — allow birth day abortion. And in seven of those, women don’t need a reason. A pregnant mom at 39 weeks can literally walk into a willing clinic and ask for an abortion, no questions asked. This is what liberals mean when they talk about “codifying” Roe v. Wade. Democrats know better than anyone that the default effect of that ruling was making abortion legal through all nine months. The only reason there are any restrictions at all on late-term abortion is because certain states took it upon themselves to enact them.

The abortion industry and its political and media allies created the narrative that elective, later-term abortions only occur when the mother’s life is in danger or a fetal anomaly is discovered.

During the 2016 presidential race, failed Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton brought the same false claim forward once again.

The problem with the claim is that abortionists themselves have been saying it is false for decades.

According to a 1997 report in the Los Angeles Times, Ron Fitzsimmons, former executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted partial birth abortions were not that rare.

“The abortion rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it and so, probably, does everyone else,” Fitzsimmons said, adding that he “lied through [his] teeth” during a Nightline interview when he said partial-birth abortions were rarely performed and only due to fetal anomalies and serious health risks to the mother.

"The majority of these procedures [late-term abortions] are performed… on healthy women and healthy fetuses." – Ron Fitzsimmons, Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers https://t.co/S8IiG32gr9

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) February 6, 2019

Murdered abortionist George Tiller told National Abortion Federation attendees in 1995:

We have some experience with late terminations; about 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past 5 years.

“That equates to a mere eight percent of Tiller’s late-term patients who aborted because their babies were diagnosed prenatally with a health condition,” pro-life organization Live Action observed.

A study released in 2013 by the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute also found that women who were seeking both first-trimester and late-term abortions provided the same reasons for delaying the procedure, including “not knowing about the pregnancy,” “trouble deciding about the abortion,” and “disagreeing about the abortion with the man involved.”

The study concluded that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”

A 2018 report for the Congressional Research Service noted that Dr. Diana Greene Foster, professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said abortions for fetal anomaly “make up a small minority of later abortion” and that, due to inadequate data, those for endangerment to the life of the mother are even more difficult to describe.

Former Planned Parenthood President Dr. Leana Wen repeated the same falsehood about later-term abortions:

90% of abortions occur before 21 weeks. As a doctor & public health expert, I can tell you that those that occur later often result from a diagnosis of severe fetal abnormalities, or serious risks to the woman's health.

— Leana Wen, M.D. (@DrLeanaWen) February 6, 2019

In late 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported nearly 13,000 fully developed babies who would be able to survive outside the womb are aborted annually.

In June 2019, the Hill reported on a Harvard Center for American Political Studies (CAPS)/Harris poll that revealed only eight percent of Americans say abortion should be permitted until the third trimester of pregnancy.

Additionally, only six percent say abortion should be allowed “up until the birth of the child.”

Perkins wrote that, “amazingly,” Democrats want even more than abortion at the moment of birth:

Based on their voting record, they want “abortion” after birth too. Americans saw this for themselves with gut-wrenching clarity, when Joe Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), was one of those 44 senators who marched to the floor and endorsed infanticide as a legitimate form of health care — not once, but twice. Now, six months later, the mainstream media wants to pretend none of this ever happened. But if abortion is “moral,” — nay, “sacred” as Nancy Pelosi said — why the sudden self-consciousness?

“It all boils down to one thing: the Democrats’ radicalism brings in the bucks — but not the ballots,” he concluded.

“Voters couldn’t be more turned off by ideas like tearing down the only wall between taxpayers and the abortion industry in the Hyde amendment,” Perkins said. “Or by the plan to pack the courts with Roe ideologues. Imagine how repulsed they’d be to know that the woman campaigning for America’s second most powerful job is on record fighting to let newborns die.”