Micaiah Bilger: Snopes Claims Abortion Isn’t the Leading Cause of Death Because Babies Don’t Die in Abortions

WASHINGTON, DC – Snopes has become more of a left-wing ideology proponent than a fact checker.

The site recently ran a piece attacking the assertion that abortion is the leading cause of death in the world, a statistic reported by LifeNews.com, Breitbart and other conservative outlets.

The statistic came by comparing data from Worldometers, an independent site that collects and reports data from governments and other reputable organizations. Breitbart contrasted the abortion numbers to other causes of death, including cancer, HIV/AIDS, traffic accidents and suicide, and found that abortions far outnumbered every other cause.

The site estimated there were 41.9 million abortions in the world in 2018.

But Snopes argued that abortions are a “medical procedure,” not a cause of death.

According to its report:

Stating that abortion is the “leading cause of death” worldwide (as opposed to a medical procedure) is a problematic pronouncement, because that stance takes a political position, one which is at odds with the scientific/medical world. The medical community does not confer personhood upon fetuses that are not viable outside the womb, so counting abortion as a “cause of death” does not align with the practices of health organizations such as WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) …

Heather Boonstra who works for the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research group, told Snopes that abortion is a “legal, constitutionally protected medical procedure in the United States.” Therefore, Snopes seemingly concluded, it cannot be a cause of death.

Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com

But world-wide, many other countries do prohibit abortions because their leaders recognize that an abortion kills an unborn baby. The United States is one of only seven countries in the world that allows elective abortions past 20 weeks — a fact confirmed by the Washington Post fact checker. Most other countries recognize that unborn babies have value and deserve protection either at conception or at some point later in pregnancy.

Snopes doubled-down on its claims, though, citing a 2015 quote from the tech magazine Wired: “Here, modern science offers no clarity. If anything, the past century of scientific advances have only made the answer more complicated. As scientists have peered into wombs with ultrasound and looked directly at sperm entering an egg, they’ve found that all the bright lines they thought existed dissolving.”

This is not backed up by scientific findings, though. In 2016, scientists at Northwestern University in Chicago released an amazing video showing a flash of light that occurs at the moment of conception – when a human life forms. Dozens of other biologists, scientists, medical authorities and even some abortion activists have admitted that human life does begin at conception, and an abortion does kill that human being.

In the next paragraph, even Snopes cited a source, biologist Scott Gilbert, who admitted that a human life begins at conception:

Concluding an entry on the topic, RationalWiki quotes developmental biologist Scott Gilbert in saying that “The entity created by fertilization is indeed a human embryo, and it has the potential to be human adult. Whether these facts are enough to accord it personhood is a question influenced by opinion, philosophy and theology, rather than by science.”

The Snopes report is full-on projection. It and other pro-abortion groups are the ones ignoring science and basic facts because they do not support their political ideology. “Personhood” is a political talking point that they rely on because they cannot refute the science about life in the womb. Like it or not, it is well established that an abortion kills a unique, living human being.