Though lies told in Washington, D.C. are just as commonplace as extra-martial affairs, it's still worth pointing out when some of the more egregious ones are uttered, the latter of which is exactly what happened during a recent Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the issue of abortion.
The hearing, which took place last Wednesday, was on "The Continued Assault on Reproductive Freedoms in a Post-Dobbs America." As one might imagine, Democrats on the committee came loaded for bear, including its chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).
SEE ALSO: Jesse Watters Catches Dick Durbin in Multiple Falsehoods Regarding Jeffrey Epstein Flight Logs
Toward the end of the hearing, Durbin and another Democrat Senator on the committee, Peter Welch (D-VT), responded to an earlier statement made by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) about how Democrats support abortion through all stages of pregnancy, up until birth.
“My understanding is that late-term abortions are very rare, and it’s almost always — really probably always — where there’s a medical emergency and the life of the woman is imperiled," Welch said, according to an accounting from NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru.
Durbin went further, proclaiming he had stats from the CDC to back up his (and Welch's) rationale for their support for abortion at any pregnancy stage:
I listened to [Cruz] and then I read some information given to me by my staff. What are the reasons for really late-term abortions? Well, there are three. And the information I’m reading from comes from the Center for Disease Control. Why women need access to abortion late in pregnancy: maternal health endangerment; diagnosis of severe fetal abnormality which didn’t show up or develop until late in the pregnancy; restrictive state laws that made it difficult for a woman to get an abortion earlier in pregnancy. And we’re talking about 1 percent of all abortions.
The problem with that statement is that the Centers for Disease Control have said no such thing, as Ponnuru later pointed out to Durbin's office after obtaining an email from a CDC spokesperson that read “We don’t have any other abortion surveillance reports beyond the annual one. You are correct, the reports do not describe reasons for abortion.”
Durbin's office responded to the inquiry by highlighting another study on abortion statistics - which includes other reasons for late-term abortions that neither Welch nor Durbin saw fit to share during the committee hearing:
Yesterday, an aide emailed to say that the source for Durbin’s claims about the reasons for abortions late in pregnancy was not the CDC. Rather, he relied on the Kaiser Family Foundation and a study by medical sociologist Katrina Kimport.
KFF, however, cites several reasons for abortions after 20 weeks beyond those that Durbin presented as an exhaustive list: for example, difficulty coming up with the money for an abortion and not being aware of the pregnancy. Kimport’s study of third-trimester abortion also lists financial difficulties, lack of awareness of the pregnancy, and other reasons that Durbin did not list.
As RedState has previously documented, Durbin's habit of spouting easily refutable whoppers in recent weeks has gotten worse, with Cruz also laying into him over the suggestion he was "Islamophobic" for opposing President Joe Biden's nomination of Adeel Abdullah Mangi the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) has also made it a point to refute the false claim, as we also reported.
Durbin is of course entitled to his own opinion but he is not entitled to his own facts. Unfortunately, we're going to see many more of these falsehoods spouted in the coming weeks and months as Democrats and their media allies crank up the fearmongering over the abortion issue.
So gird your loins, and keep the receipts handy because countering the left's war machine is going to be essential to defeating Joe Biden in November.
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