Yahoo! Beauty attempts to slam Pence on life issues… forgets to fact check

Just in case anyone needed a reminder that Yahoo! Beauty wasn’t exactly the place to go for deep political-constitutional analysis, Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy (a recipient of Planned Parenthood’s “Media Excellence” award for pro-abortion propaganda such as deceiving Glamour readers about Plan B’s abortifacient capacity) has one.

She writes a “Debate Explainer” about “What Could Happen to Abortion, Birth Control if Trump Becomes President,” but all she really explains is that she doesn’t understand what laws actually do.

Uffalussy specifically attacks Trump’s running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, as “the man who signed a state law earlier this year that bans abortions because a fetus has been diagnosed with a disability or genetic abnormality or because of a fetus’s sex or race” and “requires women to view an ultrasound of their fetus and hear its heartbeat 18 hours before having an abortion performed.”

Why are these horrible things? She doesn’t say; apparently you’re just supposed to assume it all sounds scary (although for the record, the law didn’t require that women view the ultrasounds; just that they be presented to them. Yahoo Beauty fact-checking, everyone!).

While a member of Congress, Pence was the first congressman to introduce a bill to defund Planned Parenthood in 2007 and got onboard the “legitimate rape” bandwagon in an attempt to redefine rape to further ban abortion access. Pence cosponsored a “personhood” bill during his time in the House — a measure that, if made into law, would define life as beginning at fertilization and would outlaw all abortion, some forms of contraception, and the practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which many people rely on to have children.

Uffalussy’s source for the charge of redefining rape doesn’t specify which bill they’re talking about (when lying, making it harder to fact-check is a must). But this seems to be a reference to one of several bills over the years that, in the spirit of compromise, accepted rape exceptions but narrowed their application to cases of “forcible rape” (as opposed to cases such as statutory rape with a willing partner who cannot legally consent).

Pro-aborts have tried to gin up hysteria about this several times over the years, but the truth is that not only did these bills redefine nothing, but the distinction between “forcible” and “statutory rape” was also already an established part of the law before pro-lifers came along.

As for the “personhood’ bill” she’s referring to, it’s actually the Life at Conception Act, which as I’ve written about recently, wouldn’t do anything about contraception or IVF (which should be obvious since it doesn’t even directly ban abortion).

Pence is also the man who, as governor of Indiana, signed into law — law that was eventually blocked by a federal judge — a requirement that all fetal tissue must be buried or cremated, even that resulting from a miscarriage. So yes, Pence tried to ensure that women who had a miscarriage but did not save the fetal tissue and bring it to a hospital for verification and then burial would be criminally charged.

As I’ve covered before, this lie is insane even by pro-abortion standards. The bill did not require women to have or pay for a burial for their aborted babies; it required the abortion facility to either bury or cremate the remains unless the mother chooses an alternate costlier means of burial. But don’t take my word for it—even Snopes acknowledged the charge was “mostly false.”

And the new lie about forcing women to save and bring in fetal tissue from miscarriages is hard to square with the opening of the miscarriage section, which makes clear that it’s talking about handling remains “after a woman has her miscarried fetus expelled or extracted in a health care facility” (emphasis added).

In light of all this, I suppose it would be unreasonable to expect a writer for Yahoo! Beauty to know much about Roe v. Wade either, the legal merits of which are so flawed that many pro-abortion scholars admit it’s bad law. It would be unreasonable to expect such a writer to know that overturning Roe could simply restore the right to vote on abortion rather than directly ban it. Then again, that also raises the question of why Yahoo! Beauty is dabbling in legal commentary to begin with!

Uffalussy also complains that Donald Trump cited abortion as a judicial litmus test and openly supports overturning Roe v. Wade. She cites and condemns four judges from Trump’s list of judicial nominees William Pryor, Steven Colloton, Raymond Gruender, and Neil Gorsuch.

But while these judges might be opposed to legal abortion and access to abortifacient birth control in their capacities as voters or private citizens, Uffalussy’s examples of their actions as judges only show them doing one thing: upholding private citizens’ First Amendment right against coerced participation in or support for practices that violate their religious beliefs. None of the cases Uffalussy cites show any of these judges restricting legal access to contraception (real access, not the Choicespeak hijacking of the word).

As egregious as all of these falsehoods are, ultimately they aren’t the scary part. No, that would be the fact that more often than not, the abortion coverage from more “serious” mainstream news sites isn’t even close to accurate.