We’re back with the latest installment of You Be the Judge, where our team of independent fact-checkers looks at a claim, puts it in context, goes beyond the carefully worded claim to break down the issues, presents all the facts and then lets you be the judge on whether it holds water.
It should be no secret by now that we routinely disagree with the findings and methodology our friends on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s PolitiFact team employ in rating claims. But this week we’re going to lay off them, kind of.
Instead of breaking down a claim and contrasting the facts with PolitiFact’s ruling, we’re going to look at a claim PolitiFact didn’t examine, but should have—where Gov. Scott Walker stands on a woman’s right to make personal health care choices.
Walker Opposes All Abortions
A woman’s right to safe, legal abortion has been settled law in the United States for more than 40 years now. But as the Republican Party has tacked hard and fast to the right in the face of increasing pressure from a small yet powerful group of tea party extremists, we’ve seen an unprecedented assault on women’s rights to comprehensive reproductive health care at the state level.
Scott Walker, who has a long history of curtailing reproductive freedom and limiting access to contraceptives dating back to his time in the Legislature, is no stranger to the far right’s cause célèbre; his first term in office has seen five women’s health clinics shuttered due to his ideologically motivated funding cuts and he’s quietly signed multiple bills that erect barriers for women seeking safe, legal abortions.
He’s also frequently described himself as “100% pro-life,” meaning he opposes abortion in all cases, even rape, incest or when a woman’s health is at risk, and touted the endorsement of Pro-Life Wisconsin, a conservative social organization that believes birth control is an abortifacient.
Walker’s anti-abortion credentials are completely solid, so what are we even debating here?
Things got a little blurry—intentionally so, we presume—when Walker released a television ad in early October saying that while he’s pro-life, he “supported legislation that would increase safety and provide more information to a woman considering her options. That bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”
Walker doesn’t specifically cite the legislation to which he is referring in the ad, but we’re guessing he’s talking about a law he signed quietly in July 2013 that required women seeking abortion to get an ultrasound and mandating that doctors performing the procedure have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles.
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The problem with Walker’s claim is that neither of those requirements do anything to improve safety or give women more information. In fact, the medical community largely opposed this legislation. Organizations like the Wisconsin Medical Society, Wisconsin Academy of Family Physicians, Wisconsin Public Health Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists all opposed the bill.
Then there’s the concern of admitting privileges. Speaking to Kaiser Health News in August of this year, Jeanne Conry, former president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said, “Admitting-privileges legislation would impose stricter requirements on facilities where abortions are performed than on facilities that perform much riskier procedures.” Conry also cited as an example, “the mortality rate associated with a colonoscopy is more than 40 times greater than that of abortion,” yet noted that gastroenterologists who perform such procedures outside of the hospital setting do not face similar requirements “in the context of safety.”
Kaiser Health News also reports that, “opponents point out that most abortion providers cannot meet the number-of-admissions standard for gaining privileges because so few of their patients need hospital care.”
With no medical reasons or justifiable safety concerns for this kind of intrusive regulation, it seems disingenuous at best for Scott Walker to suggest that his anti-abortion legislation was anything more than a backdoor channel to chip away at access to abortion since he can’t legally ban it altogether. If the governor would outlaw abortion in all cases given the opportunity, that’s his choice. But we think it’s a position outside of the mainstream and one he ought to defend publicly in this race so you can be the judge.
