“Go deeper” indeed.
Vox is the first newsroom this week to parrot Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s, D-Calif., absurd claim that more than a million women died from unsafe abortions in the two decades preceding the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
The California senator’s bogus assertion came Wednesday during Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
“In the 1950s and 60s, the two decades before Roe, deaths from illegal abortions in this country ran between 200,000 and 1.2 million,” she said, “citing” the Guttmacher Institute.
Feinstein added, “So, a lot of women died in that period … I think knowing going into it, how you make a judgment on these issues is really important to our vote as to whether to support you or not. Because I don’t want to go back to those death tolls in this country.”
You’d think that a statistic of this magnitude and seriousness would merit at least a “whoa!” or “is that true?” from a supposedly serious news organization. But you’d be wrong.
Vox’s Anna North let Feinstein’s claim go unchallenged, presenting it as fact in an article titled, “Brett Kavanaugh was asked about abortion in his confirmation hearing. His answer tells us nothing.”
[Also read: Dianne Feinstein grills Brett Kavanaugh over Second Amendment rulings]
North repeated:
[…]
Feinstein pressed for specifics, saying that knowing “how you make a judgment on these issues is really important to our vote as whether to support you or not. Because I don’t want to go back to those death tolls in this country.”
The article continues like that until its conclusion, wherein North writes, “Ultimately, saying that he understands why people care so much about Roe v. Wade doesn’t tell Americans anything about how Kavanaugh would actually rule. Potentially more informative: President Trump’s promise that, if elected, he would appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court.”
There is no attempt whatsoever to verify whether Feinstein’s shocking statistic about pre-Roe mortality rates is true. It’s not, in case you’re wondering.
The Guttmacher Institute, which Feinstein “cited,” estimates that 200,000 to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed annually during the 1950s and 1960s. That estimate is not – not! – an estimate of maternal deaths from illegal abortions.
Vox would’ve known this had it taken just two minutes to double-check the apparently astounding claim that the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee had just made. But I guess only some people in power are worth fact-checking.
[Kavanaugh: Roe has been ‘reaffirmed many times’]
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This post has been updated.
