By Dave Andrusko
The name Leana Wen is probably familiar to many readers of NRL News Today. The former president of Planned Parenthood, Dr. Wen was sacked less than one year into her presidency amidst a swirl of charges and denials, counter-denials and counter-charges.
Lately she’s become a regular on network news and even more so, cable news. Dr. Wen is kind of an all purpose updated Dr. Welby; she appears whenever a folksy but articulate “expert” is needed.
Charlie Cooke and Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review Online wrote about her yesterday. Summarizing what Cooke concluded, DeSanctis writes:
The upshot: Wen is once again claiming to have adapted her medical guidance in response to the ever-evolving “science” when in reality she’s drifting wherever political winds happen to blow.
Of course, as many readers will recall, whatever her disagreements were internally, when it came to singing the party line on abortion publicly, Dr. Wen could be counted on to be pitch perfect.
In 2020, she made it to Glenn Kessler’s “annual roundup of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.” Pinocchios refer to how deceptive an assertion is, with four Pinocchios representing the highest degree of distortion. Three Pinocchios means (according to the Washington Post) that a statement has “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.” …
Although Kessler told us there is “no particular order” to the examples, lo and behold after the pro-forma, obligatory thrice thrashing of President Trump, Kessler went directly to “Thousands of women died every year pre-Roe,” an assertion from then-PPFA President Wen.
Briefly, Kessler told his readers, “We dug through the statistics and it turns out she was citing numbers from the 1930s, before the advent of antibiotics. In 1972, the number of deaths in the United States from legal abortions was 24 and from illegal abortions 39, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
This is good, although there is much, much more.
*Kessler doesn’t list how many Pinocchios for any of the Top Ten, but Wen’s assertion drew the maximum—four.
*As Kessler said at the time of the original critique, “The problem with Wen’s claim is that is derived from data that is decades old.” In truth, as Kessler was too kind to point out directly, the claim was based on data that was inadequate when it was accumulated and patently absurd in retrospect.
*Wen peddled this nonsense not once, but three times.
*In explaining his “Four Pinocchios” [“whopper” status] designation Kessler concluded “Wen is a doctor, and the ACOG is made up of doctors. They should know better than to peddle statistics based on data that predates the advent of antibiotics. Even given the fuzzy nature of the data and estimates, there is no evidence that in the years immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s decision, thousands of women died every year in the United States from illegal abortions.”
There were more examples—abortion being just “3%” of the ‘services’ Planned Parenthood provides, for example–but the point is made.