In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign was making false claims about the candidate’s record on abortion in the Illinois state senate, and the Washington Post’s fact-checker bought them. In 2012, another fact-checker conceded that the paper had gone too easy on him four years earlier but still misrepresented his record in a way that minimized its extremism. In 2019, yet another fact-checker claimed, falsely, that President Trump was wrong about a new law in New York protecting abortion. On August 24, the Post got an abortion “fact check” wrong again.
On August 27, the Post ran an article by Pam Kelley about a voter who has not decided on a presidential candidate. Kelley notes that the voter was troubled by what Republican-convention speakers characterized as the Biden-Harris ticket’s “support for late-term abortion and infanticide.” There follow four sentences of attempted correction from Kelley.
She writes:
This characterization of Biden and Harris is false, according to fact-checkers and experts. The policies Democrats support generally limit abortions to the first 20 to 24 weeks of gestation. Most abortions are performed at eight weeks or earlier. Experts have told The Washington Post that abortions up to the moment of birth, what could be described as infanticide, are not happening in the United States.
In the first sentence, the link yields one fact-checker (Kelley’s colleague Salvador Rizzo), who quotes one expert (National Abortion Federation board member Katie Watson, not that the Post discloses that affiliation), who’s got one dumb analogy to clinch her case: Supposedly saying that people who support legal abortion also support it late in pregnancy is like calling Second Amendment supporters fans of school shootings.
The analogy fails. Support for making it legal to shoot kids at school cannot be inferred from support for the Second Amendment, and supporters of the Second Amendment universally favor prohibiting and punishing such conduct. A significant portion of supporters of legal abortion, on the other hand, believe it should be legal even late in pregnancy. If someone says that abortion should be legal early in pregnancy, it would be invalid to infer that he necessarily supports making it legal late in pregnancy. If he says that abortions should be legal without mentioning a limit, the question of how late in pregnancy that support goes is a fair one that requires an examination of the evidence.
Sentence two offers zero support for its assertion. Kelley deals with none of the evidence that Biden and Harris believe abortion should be legal late in pregnancy.
Sentences three and four have nothing to do with whether Biden or Harris believe abortion should be legal late in pregnancy. Nor do they have anything to do with whether either candidate believes infants who survive abortions should receive ordinary medical care — something Senator Harris, like nearly every Democrat in the Senate, voted against.