Hillary Clinton spread a Democratic talking point about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday, despite it being deemed false by the Washington Post fact-checker and PolitiFact in the days prior.
Clinton accused Kavanaugh of personally referring to birth control pills as “abortion-inducing drugs” during his confirmation hearing last week.
“Kavanaugh didn’t use that term because he misunderstands the basic science of birth control—the fact that birth control prevents fertilization of eggs in the first place. He used that term because it’s a dog whistle to the extreme right,” she wrote in a series of tweets.
[Opinion: Brett Kavanaugh was right to call contraception an ‘abortion-inducing drug’]
I want to be sure we’re all clear about something that Brett Kavanaugh said in his confirmation hearings last week. He referred to birth-control pills as “abortion-inducing drugs.” That set off a lot of alarm bells for me, and it should for you, too.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 12, 2018
Kavanaugh didn’t use that term because he misunderstands the basic science of birth control—the fact that birth control prevents fertilization of eggs in the first place. He used that term because it’s a dog whistle to the extreme right.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 12, 2018
The Washington Post gave Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., its worst rating — “four Pinocchios” — on Tuesday for claiming Kavanaugh used the term to refer to contraception.
Kavanaugh used the phrase during his confirmation hearing when discussing a lawsuit brought by an anti-abortion religious group challenging Obamacare rules on providing coverage for contraception.
“That was a group that was being forced to provide a certain kind of health coverage over their religious objection to their employees, and under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the question was first, was this a substantial burden on the religious exercise? And it seemed to me quite clearly it was,” Kavanaugh said last week. “It was a technical matter of filling out a form, in that case with — that — they said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were — as a religious matter, objected to.”
The Washington Post fact-checker said Kavanaugh referring to “they said,” shows “he is merely reflecting the plaintiffs’ argument.”
The newspaper cited Kavanaugh’s dissent in the case, in which he wrote, “They complain that submitting the required form contravenes their religious beliefs because doing so, in their view, makes them complicit in providing coverage for contraceptives, including some that they believe operate as abortifacients.”
PolitiFact said Harris took the abortion-inducing drug statement out of context, rating her accusations false.
“Kavanaugh has not defined what he believes constitutes ‘abortion-inducing drugs,'” the fact-checker wrote.
