Charlie Cooke had a post earlier today offering a thorough critique of a recent op-ed from Leana Wen, one of our nation’s foremost self-appointed Covid-19 czars. The upshot: Wen is once again claiming to have adapted her medical guidance in response to the ever-evolving “science” when in reality she’s drifting wherever political winds happen to blow.
It isn’t just with regard to Covid that Wen has shown a willingness to eschew reality when her politics requires it. Back when she was serving as president of Planned Parenthood — a role that, for obvious reasons, requires habitual reliance on falsehoods — she had no trouble repeating all of the abortion industry’s inaccurate talking points. In particular, she got in hot water for repeating a favorite canard of the abortion-rights movement: the claim that thousands of women died as the result of illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade.
This assertion was so egregious that even the Washington Post was compelled to factcheck it, awarding Wen four Pinocchios and placing her on the Post’s list of the top 13 falsehoods for 2019. There is no data to suggest that women died by the thousands from “unsafe” abortions before Roe; in fact, the best data suggest quite the opposite. In 1972, for instance, the CDC reports that a few dozen women died as the result of illegal abortions. (Those deaths, by the way, are worth lamenting despite being far fewer than Wen claimed — but legalizing abortion is no solution.)
Abortion supporters love the fiction about thousands of maternal deaths because it’s a convenient way both to accuse pro-lifers of not caring about women’s health and to frighten Americans into believing that a post-Roe country would be a hellscape for women. The only trouble is that the data point they invoke is provably false — a fact that didn’t stop Wen from parroting it.