Then Again, Who's Counting Anyway?

The American Patriot at Patriots For Bush, where I have recently been invited to post, notes an interesting difference between truth, and what Democrats will say to get elected.

What Democrats have been saying is that abortions have actually increased since Bush took office. The statistic, put forth by Glen Harold Stassen, is used to show that under Bush's "authoritarian," and "theocratic" rule, we have actually gone backwards in trying to reduce abortions.

Stassen’s numbers, and the widespread acceptance they seemed to be getting, prompted the Guttmacher Institute to conduct a special analysis to update its comprehensive census of abortion providers for the year 2000. The increases that Stassen reported “would be a significant change in a long-standing trend in the US ,” Leila Darabi of the institute explained to Factcheck.

Besides the fact that Stassen claimed to have data only from 16 states, the Guttmacher Institute said it is likely that many of the states Stassen picked have higher abortion rates historically, have a higher concentration of population subgroups that tend to have more abortions, and see abortion rates rise more quickly when they do go up. Stassen himself named only Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado among the 16 states he says he studied, but his co-author on the Houston Chronicle article listed each state in a separate article posted on the Internet.

The Guttmacher Institute found that two of the states Stassen used had unreliable reporting systems. In Colorado , for instance, where Stassen claimed that rates “skyrocketed 111 percent,” the reporting procedure had been recently changed in order to compensate for historic underreporting. Guttmacher also found Arizona had an inconsistent reporting system.

In the meantime, of course, prominent Democrats have been lambasting the Bush administration using Stassen's bad, and possibly cooked, numbers.

Clinton: But unfortunately, in the last few years, while we are engaged in an ideological debate instead of one that uses facts and evidence and common sense, the rate of abortion is on the rise in some states.

Kerry: And do you know that in fact abortion has gone up in these last few years with the draconian policies that Republicans have….

Dean:You know that abortions have gone up 25 percent since George Bush was President?

In fact, no one at the DNC has been able to produce any source for Dean's 25 percent figure, so it is probably just another one he made up on the fly. As to the other two, well...I presume they'll just go on saying what they have been, safe in the knowledge that the MSM will do no fact-checking whatsoever.

So, the next time you an unchallenged quote, or an unchallenged soundbite, accusing the Bush administration of increasing abortions in this country, you will know there are two people not doing their job.