After Mike Pence’s speech at the RNC yesterday evening, an NBC News fact-checker got to work attempting to disprove the vice president’s claim that Joe Biden “supports taxpayer funding of abortion right up to the moment of birth.” (As David Harsanyi noticed last night, NBC was not the only outlet bungling the facts on Biden and abortion.)
“Biden supports abortion rights,” fact-checker Jane C. Timm concedes, before employing both a falsehood and a misdirection in her effort to correct Pence.
“Elective abortions do not occur ‘up until the moment of birth,’” Timm writes. “Just 1.2 percent occur after 21 weeks of gestation, according to the latest data.”
But Timm’s second claim does not negate the first; the number of abortions that take place after 21 weeks’ gestation has nothing to do with whether abortion until birth is legal (it is), whether it takes place (it does), or, most pertinently, whether Biden favors placing restrictions of any kind on abortion, which he does not.