The Return of Big Abortion’s Biggest Pinocchio – This Time at the Supreme Court

Back in June we reported here how the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” had caught Planned Parenthood and other big abortion proponents in a whopper of a lie about the number of deaths from abortion in the bad old days before Roe v. Wade.

The Post found that Planned Parenthood’s oft-repeated “statistic” that “as many as 5,000 women died every year before 1973” was a fairy tale with no basis in actual fact. Planned Parenthood’s source for the number was a paper published by the prestigious American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) in 2014 and reaffirmed this year. When contacted by the Post, ACOG referred the reporter to its designated premier expert on abortion in the U.S., Dr. David Grimes. Grimes admitted that the numbers were never anything more than “crude estimates” and that, really, “there were no facts to be checked.” In other words, they made the whole thing up!

The Post’s researchers found that the real number of illegal abortion deaths reported by the CDC in 1972 was 39, nowhere near the “as many as 5,000 annual deaths” touted by Planned Parenthood and ACOG, and that in fact the number of such deaths had declined precipitously every year following the development of antibiotics in the 1940s. As the “Fact Checker” summed it up: “Wen [Planned Parenthood’s Director at the time] 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.”

Yes, Planned Parenthood and ACOG should know better. And according to last week’s Post article which includes the Planned Parenthood/ACOG “false stat” among its “Biggest Pinocchios of 2019,” at least Planned Parenthood fired its Director shortly after the Fact Checker bestowed his maximum “4 Pinocchios” on them back in June.

But what about ACOG? Surely after being embarrassed in this fashion the country’s premier authority on matters OB/GYN, a regular “friend of the Court” in any and every case touching upon abortion at the Supreme and all other Courts and always on the “pro-choice” side, went back and purged its authoritative “Committee Opinion No. 613,” of the “false stat” that Planned Parenthood and every other mouthpiece for Big Abortion have been spouting for decades relying on ACOG’s prestige, right? Not a chance.

ACOG’s phony “as many as 5,000 deaths annually,” which their go-to expert Dr. Grimes admitted was not a “fact to be checked” back in June is still there on its website with the notation “(Reaffirmed 2019).”

But it’s even worse than that. Two weeks ago, ACOG filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the Louisiana case involving a law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at local hospitals (a case we’ve discussed before here). ACOG is joined on the brief by a host of other medical organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA), most of whom probably deferred to ACOG’s expertise as the authority on the specifically OB/GYN aspects of the case.

Included in the “Table of Authorities” section of ACOG’s brief, under “Other Authorities”—there it is!—ACOG Committee Opinion 613, Increasing Access to Abortion, complete with the “false stat” debunked  six months ago, although minus the well-earned 4 Pinocchios.

Unless the justices and their clerks are devoted fans of the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” with a perfect recall of his articles, they would have no way of knowing that what ACOG and all these other prestigious bodies are presenting to them as an “authority” contains one of “the biggest Pinocchios of 2019.”

Big Abortion and its supporters are forever crying about the need for “evidence-based science” and (falsely) accusing the prolife movement of relying on something less than that when we point out, for example, that human life starts at conception. But here they are, under the cover of highly reputable lobbying outfits like ACOG and the AMA, peddling something that, as ACOG’s Dr. Grimes was forced to admit, is actually “not a fact to be checked.” And peddling it, not just in the media, or on the internet, but at the Supreme Court itself.

We are preparing to file our own amicus brief in this same case, explaining to the Court the reality of how dangerous abortion actually is, using real facts and statistics. Take action with us by signing on to our brief below.