Dobbs Sent Media Spin on Abortion into Overdrive. Remembering Two Years of Distortion and Dishonesty

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look back at the last two years of media madness and misinformation on abortion and cover more media misses.

It’s officially been two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, setting off a tidal wave of mainstream-media hysterics and misinformation on abortion access and safety.

In honor of the second anniversary, we have rounded up some of the worst media offenses to date:

Outright Distortions

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, news outlets have been all too quick to believe stories that fit within their preconceived narratives on abortion.

For example, in August 2022, several major outlets latched onto a story about the arrest of a mother and daughter in Nebraska. The mother was arrested for giving her daughter a chemical-abortion pill after the prescribed gestation limit, and the daughter was arrested for allegedly trying to burn and then bury the aborted child.

Forbes reported that “Facebook Gave Nebraska Cops A Teen’s DMs So They Could Prosecute Her For Having An Abortion.” NBC explained that “Facebook turned over chat messages between mother and daughter now charged over abortion.” The Daily Beast claimed that “Facebook Turned Over Messages in Disturbing Abortion Case Against Teen and Mom.” More than a half-dozen other outlets framed the story similarly.

Yet the headlines were deceiving; the 17-year-old teen faces no criminal charges for taking the abortion pills at 23 weeks pregnant — an age at which 25 percent of prematurely born children will survive outside the womb — despite Nebraska laws prohibiting abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation. This is because no pro-life state laws punish a mother who receives an abortion.

Celeste Burgess was instead charged with “removing, concealing or abandoning” a dead body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting. After the pills caused the death of her unborn child, Burgess and her mother tried first to burn and then to bury the remains. She and her mother initially told investigators that she had miscarried.

The alleged crimes all occurred before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported a separate story of a 35-year-old Texas woman who was denied treatment by a hospital as she endured her second miscarriage within a year. Hospital staff declined to perform a dilation and curettage when she showed up “doubled over in pain and screaming as she passed a large blood clot” during her second miscarriage. The hospital “sent her home with instructions to return only if she was bleeding so excessively that her blood filled a diaper more than once an hour.”

While the Times blamed the woman’s experience on Senate Bill 8, which created a private right of action allowing Texans to sue abortion providers for procedures performed while a fetal heartbeat exists, little evidence exists to suggest the policy stood in the way of the woman’s care.

According to the woman, Amanda, the hospital never even mentioned S.B. 8, which, by the way, explicitly states that a physician is not in violation of the bill if he or she performed a test for a heartbeat and did not detect one before performing an abortion. The article notes that Amanda’s embryo “had no cardiac activity during that visit or on an ultrasound a week earlier.”

The subject of chemical abortion also proved ripe for misinformation in the wake of Dobbs.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins doubled down on her argument that chemical abortion drugs are safe, after ADF’s Kristen Waggoner refuted her claims on air, saying, “What the FDA’s own statistics and documents say is that up to 7 percent of women are going to have surgical complications.”

Collins responded to a clip of the interaction on X claiming that mifepristone is “highly safe and effective,” and that the drug’s safety is “on par with those of common over-the-counter pain relievers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, studies show.” Yet as my former NR colleague John McCormack notes, “1-in-300 people taking Advil or Tylenol do not end up experiencing ‘major adverse events’ like serious hemorrhage ‘hospitalization or a significant infection.’”

Plain Bad Takes

Regular readers of this column will know there has been no shortage of bad takes from pundits on abortion since June 2022.

While the co-hosts of The View have offered enough fodder for their own section (their own column, more likely), perhaps the worst offense was brought to us by Ana Navarro, who seemed to advocate for eugenics in arguing that she believes abortion is necessary because she has a family “with a lot of special needs kids.”

“I have a brother who’s 57 and has the mental and motor skills of a one-year-old and I know what that means financially, emotionally, physically for a family and I know not all families can do it,” she said, adding that she has a step-granddaughter with Down syndrome and a step-grandson “who is very autistic.”

Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, however, was not to be outdone.

First, she claimed the sound expecting mothers hear on an ultrasound is actually “manufactured” by men who want to control women’s bodies.

She followed it up with a suggestion that legal abortion is an important component of fighting inflation. “Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas,” Abrams said. “It’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue.”

Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, readers were told “the end of Roe could enable a horrifying neo-Nazi plot.”

The column reads: “Abortion is seen by white extremists as part of the so-called white genocide plot, and in that sense, reproductive rights are a part of their ‘white extinction anxiety.’ The loss of Roe v. Wade, in this scenario, directly serves white supremacist extremist goals — as long as it is white babies who cannot be aborted.”

However, as pro-lifers have noted time and time again, abortion restrictions do not cause forced births. The forced-birth argument ignores the fact that, except for cases of rape, women are not forced to have sex and become pregnant in the first place.

The media found ways to blame pro-lifers for any number of issues after the overturn of Roe.

“America is facing a diaper crisis and the anti-abortion movement is making it worse,” or so argues Sandra Salathe at Yahoo Finance.

And, in Slate’s imagined post-Roe dystopia, “The Next Republican President Has a Plan to Ban Abortion Nationwide Without Congress.”

But perhaps no headline was more deserving of the Headline Fail of the Week title over the past two years than this from the Nation: “Abortion Involves Killing — and That’s OK!”

“There is something infantilizing about denying the fact that embryos die when we scrape them out of the bodies of which they are a part,” author Sophie Lewis writes. “It sentimentalizes pregnant or potentially pregnant humans as fundamentally nonviolent creatures to imply that we can’t handle the truth about what we are up to when we opt out. And it patronizes abortion-getters to insist that we are only making a health care choice, rather than (also) extinguishing a future child.”

Misleading Studies

Michael New worked overtime pushing back against a number of warped studies touted by the mainstream media in the post-Roe news environment.

No, there have not been 64,000 pregnancies caused by rape in states with a total abortion ban, as a study in JAMA Internal Medicine claimed. That study was cited in numerous news outlets, including NBC and NPR. The study relied on an “exceptionally high figure” in calculating the number of rapes that result in a conception, New explains. There are also “extremely wide disparities in reported rape statistics,” he notes.

And it should come as little surprise that the authors of the article are not without bias: The lead author, Samuel Dickman, is the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Montana, while Kari White is the executive and scientific director of Resound Research for Reproductive Health.

In February, the journal Nature published a study that claims to show that telehealth-obtained chemical abortions pose few health risks. Not so, New tells us, despite the study receiving coverage in several mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, Forbes, Bloomberg, and U.S. News and World Report.

He explains:

The main methodological problem with the study is that it relies on survey data and therefore fails to track health outcomes from all of the women who had obtained chemical abortions.  Specifically, the study identifies over 6,154 women who had obtained them. However, it received a follow-up contact for only about 4,613. That means that the researchers have no idea what happened to nearly a fourth of the women who had obtained chemical abortions via telehealth. That clearly biases the results, as women who suffered adverse effects after obtaining a chemical abortion would probably be less likely to respond to a follow-up survey.

And even so, the study found that 81 women visited emergency rooms and that 15 had serious complications. In addition to that, ten were hospitalized, six received blood transfusions, and two were treated for infections.

Media Run Cover for Democrats’ Abortion Extremism

After Florida governor Ron DeSantis told Democrats they are wrong for wanting to “allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth,” the media quickly stepped in to “fact-check” the claim, which came during the first Republican presidential primary debate.

White House press secretary-turned-MSNBC-anchor Jen Psaki wrote in a post on X, “No one supports abortion up until birth.”

The argument was apparently still on her mind days later, when Psaki shared a clip on X responding to “Republicans’ misleading claims about late-term abortions.”

“The argument that Democrats are advocating for more late term abortions is completely misleading. I explain with lots of FACTS today . . .” she said.

Former Democratic senator Al Franken joined in to claim: “No one is trying to allow abortions right up to birth. You a******, DeSantis. #GOPDebate.”

Yet Franken himself cosponsored a bill in 2015, U.S. Senate Bill 217, that would have prevented states from restricting abortion at any stage of gestation. And several states, including California, Colorado, Maine, and New York, have passed laws in recent years that do not provide any specific week-based limits on abortion.

Katie Couric wrote in a post on X: “Worth noting that fewer than 1% of abortions occur in the third trimester. #GOPDebate. . . .”

But conservatives were quick to note that even 1.3 percent of abortions amounts to 10,000 to 12,000 babies each year.

And months earlier, the New York Times was forced to quietly change a paragraph in an article that claimed Republicans have “sought to push Democrats to define their own limits on gestational age — and falsely accused them of supporting ‘abortion until birth’ if they refused.”

After the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan called attention to the sentence, the Times amended it to read that Republicans “sought to push Democrats to define their own limits on gestational age in order to frame them, at times misleadingly, as ‘extremists’ who support ‘abortion until birth’ if they refused.” No editor’s note was added to the story to reflect the change.

Changes to AP Style

The Associated Press made at least two controversial changes to its style book after the Dobbs decision was handed down.

The stylebook now instructs reporters not to use the phrase “late-term abortion.”

“The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines late term as 41 weeks through 41 weeks and 6 days of gestation, and abortion does not happen in this period,” the stylebook explains.

As NR’s Madeleine Kearns explained at the time:

Two things are being conflated here: the clinical term “late-term pregnancy,” which refers to the margins the AP outlines and in the context of natural delivery, and late termination of pregnancy (i.e., late-term abortion), which as everyone following the abortion debate knows refers to abortions that happen at a late stage of pregnancy, typically after 24 weeks, when the baby is viable outside the womb.

The AP also now advises reporters to refer to pregnancy-resource centers as “anti-abortion centers.” At the time of the AP’s decision, more than 80 pregnancy centers had been attacked or vandalized post-Dobbs, some of them firebombed or torched, others painted over with death threats.

Headline Fail of the Week

The New York Times is apparently grasping for anti-Israel stories at this point. “Blaming Hamas for Gazans’ Suffering, Many Israelis Feel Little Sympathy,” the paper reports.

“Despite being aware of the devastation in Gaza, many in Israel ask why they should show pity when, in their view, Palestinians showed none on Oct. 7,” adds a subheading. [Emphasis added.]

Media Misses

• In reporting on the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in Texas, the Associated Press failed to mention that the two suspects in the case were in the country illegally. The two Venezuelan men, who entered the U.S. in March, allegedly lured Jocelyn Nungaray under a bridge in Houston before tying her up and killing her. While the AP gave the men’s names and ages — Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, 21, and Franklin Jose Pena Ramos, 26, — and said that they were roommates, it failed to disclose that the two men “both illegally entered the U.S. without inspection, parole or admission by a U.S. immigration officer on an unknown date and at an unknown location,” according to an ICE spokesperson.
• When MSNBC host Michael Steele asked Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts to clarify his position on “illegal immigrants,” Symone Sanders-Townsend stepped in to correct her co-host: “I want to be clear,” Sanders-Townsend told Steele. “We don’t use the term ‘illegal.’ Undocumented individuals.” “That’s sweet,” Roberts said. “They’re illegal aliens.” But Steele took the correction in stride. “Undocumented individuals,” he said.
• Former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray was recently fired from The Hill’s web series, Rising, after appearing to roll her eyes at Yarden Gonen, the sister of Hamas hostage Romi Gonen who urged her to believe Israeli women’s stories of sexual assault during the October 7 terrorist attacks. But while Gray was apparently skeptical of reports that Hamas terrorists would sexually assault Israeli women, she apparently has no problem believing a conspiracy theory that Israel would train animals to rape Palestinians. “I might have missed it, but has the Times or any other major US paper covered these reports of Israel training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners?” she wrote in a widely panned post on X.