In November 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., threatened federal intervention if Silicon Valley failed to do more to curtail the spread of “fake news.”
“You created these platforms and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will,” the senator told executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google during a congressional hearing.
So whom does the senator go and threaten when she’s the one spreading bogus information?
Feinstein unloaded a whopper of a false claim Wednesday during Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing. She claimed that approximately 1.2 million women died from illegal abortions in the 20 years preceding the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide.
“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,” the California senator said, citing the pro-choice non-profit the Guttmacher Institute.
“So, a lot of women died in that period,” the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, adding later, “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.”
[Related: Dianne Feinstein admits Democratic opposition to Brett Kavanaugh is all about abortion]
The Guttmacher Institute has reported no such thing. What Sen. Feinstein claimed during Wednesday’s hearing is either her own ignorant misreading of the institute’s reporting or it’s an intentional, outright lie. Take your pick and hold your nose.
Here’s what Guttmacher says about that “200,000 and 1.2 million” statistic:
Did you catch that? This is an estimate of the number of illegal abortions, not of maternal deaths from illegal abortions.
The nonprofit also says this:
Note: These reports say nothing about the number of pre-Roe deaths resulting from unsafe abortions. The figures quoted by Feinstein are about illegal abortions performed. For pre-Roe mortality rates, we again turn again to the senator’s source:
Feinstein wasn’t even close to being accurate. And it wasn’t like she slipped up once, jumbling the figures by mistake! She stressed her point repeatedly: If the court reverses its Roe decision, more than a million women will die each year from unsafe abortions.
The only problem with her point is that it’s based on total fiction.
Here’s hoping Google, Facebook, and Twitter closely monitor their respective platforms to ensure this fake news doesn’t spread.
