Washington Post gives '4 Pinocchios' to Planned Parenthood president for false abortion claim

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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/planned-parenthood-false-claim-women-deaths-unsafe-abortions

The president of Planned Parenthood has repeatedly spread a false claim about "thousands" of women who died due to a lack of safe abortion access before the Roe v. Wade decision, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

"We’re not going to go back in time to a time before Roe when thousands of women died every year because they didn’t have access to essential health care," said Dr. Leana Wen on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" last week.

Wen made the same claims in prior months in a radio interview and on Twitter.

 

In a fact-check piece, Glenn Kessler rated the claim with "Four Pinocchios," writing that Wen's statements were "derived from data that is decades old."

"Even given the fuzzy nature of the data and estimates, there is no evidence that in the years immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s decision, thousands of women died every year in the United States from illegal abortions," Kessler wrote, adding that abortion advocates "hurt their cause" with such unproven claims.