The topic of abortion has proven to be a controversial and dividing one, especially recently. With federal actions being taken to eradicate abortion clinics, it’s clear that this is a subject worth looking into, and claims made on this subject are worth fact-checking. Lifenews.com published an article in October 2019 explaining President Trump’s actions of de-funding 900 abortion clinics in the United States. This claim in itself is one that may not be able to be taken at face-value, however, this is not the claim that we will be fact-checking today.

In the article previously stated, it quotes from pro-life activist Marjorie Dannenfelser, who is the president of the Susan B. Anthony List. Before getting into this quote, I decided that checking Wikipedia would help to unpack what exactly the Susan B. Anthony List is. Wikipedia states that it is “an American political organization that seeks to advance pro-life women in politics.” This gave some context on Dannenfelser’s views on abortion rights. As for her quote in the article, she says, “The Title X program was not intended to be a slush fund for abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood, which violently ends the lives of more than 332,000 unborn babies a year and receives almost $60 million a year in Title X taxpayer dollars.” This is the statement of fact that I will be fact-checking today. To break down this claim and to understand some of its components, Wikipedia can provide introductory level information. According to Wikipedia, Title X is a federal grant program that supplies people with family planning and preventative health services that prioritizes those who are uninsured as well as low-income families. Another component of this claim that I felt needed clarification is the term “slush fund.” Wikipedia states that this is a fund that is not appropriately accounted for, which can be used illegally or corruptly. With these terms defined, I began to check the parts of the claim that held numerical information. To do this I used Move 1 and conducted a search on duckduckgo.com to see if any previous work had been done to fact check the claim that Planned Parenthood has terminated more than 332,000 pregnancies a year and receives more than $60 million a year. The first search term I used was “planned parenthood abortions in a year site:snopes.com site:politifact.com site:factcheck.org” The only result that looked like it could have had relevant results was this one. However, there was no relevant information here, so I moved onto the next search term. 

Since Marjorie Dannenfelser is the speaker of this quote, the next search term I plugged into duckduckgo.com is “planned parenthood Marjorie Dannenfelser site:snopes.com site:politifact.com site:factcheck.org.” With this term, there were more hits that seemed as if they could be useful since I included her name. The first link I clicked on was one from Politifact.com Upon reading this it was clear that while a Dannenfelser quote was the subject of this fact-check, it was not the same one I am checking today. The next one that seemed like it could lead to relevant articles was this one from Politifact.com. However, this led me nowhere due to the only politifact article that included Dannenfesler being the one that I had just checked and concluded was not going to be helpful. The next and last link that I looked at was this one from snopes.com. However, upon reading it, I saw that it mentioned nothing about the claim I was investigating. The last search term that I plugged in before moving on was “planned parenthood amount of terminated pregnancies 2019 site:snopes.com site:politifact.com site:factcheck.org” From this search term, there were no results that looked as though they’d be relevant, so I moved onto the next move: going upstream. 

To begin going upstream, I started by clicking on embedded links within the original article to find information that may have led to the source of the claim, and therefore a direction on whether it was true or false. The first link within the article led to a different article written by Lifenews.com. While reading through, I saw that the exact same quote by Marjorie Dannenfelser that was reported in the article for this fact-check, was also used in this one. And while I found this to be an interesting choice it didn’t offer any new information on whether the statements made in the quote were true. However, what it did offer was insight into this source’s bias towards Donald Trump and abortion. It became clear to me that this source was very much pro-life, the actual name of the site and even their advertisements showed their stance.

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After this realization, I felt it safe to conclude that any information retrieved from this source would be biased and therefore wouldn’t be able to give me answers. The next link I tried that didn’t lead to another article by Lifenews.com was one that led to an article from a source called Christian Headlines. I found that just from looking at this source’s page that there was some bias involved. Regardless, this article had nothing of significance in terms of what I was looking for, so I moved onto the next link. 

The next link led to an article from the U.S. department of Health and Human Services. The contents of the article, however, were not helpful for this fact-check. The rest of the links were clearly irrelevant to my search, so the next move to employ was Move 3, reading laterally. To read laterally, I started by going to Allsides.com, a website that ranks media bias, but upon visiting the site, I found that Lifenews.com is not included on its media bias chart.

The next step I took was searching for Lifenews.com on Google with the search term “Lifenews.com -site:Lifenews.com” so that none of the results from the source Lifenews.com would come up, therefore it would more likely be absent of bias from the source. The first article I tried out was from Mediabiasfactcheck.com. This fact-checking site ranked Lifenews.com as an extreme right biased site with mixed factual reporting. The site also said that some sources in this extreme right biased category may be untrustworthy and that Lifenews.com has been accused of fabricating news. Lifehacker.com, another source that came up in Google, reported in this article that Lifenews.com accounted for 20% of anti-abortion posts on facebook and that “Many of the most widely shared links referenced debunked or misleading narratives about abortion.” This confirmed my thoughts on Lifenews.com being an extremely biased site, and while this offered some clarity on the lack of reliability of Lifenews.com, it didn’t prove or disprove the claim that’s being fact-checked, which was made by Marjorie Dannenfelser, and not the author of the Lifenews article. So, the next step was to go to Wikipedia to see if there were answers to be found there.

On the Planned Parenthood Wikipedia page, it states that Planned Parenthood performs 324,000 abortions a year. From here, I went to the source that Wikipedia took this from, which is the Planned Parenthood 2014-2015 Annual Report. I then searched through Planned Parenthood’s site to find something more recent, and found that in their 2018-2019 report, they stated that they had performed 345,672 abortions. This answered the question about the first part of the Dannenfelser claim, which said that Planned Parenthood performs 332,000 abortions a year. I also thought it was important to be aware that there isn’t a set number of abortions each year, and that the number may vary, but all three of the numbers I found on Lifenews.com (332,000), Wikipedia (324,00), and Planned Parenthood (345,672) were within a reasonable range from eachother. And while Dannenfelser’s numbers were slightly off, they’re in the ballpark range of the truth, and the difference between the numbers is not large enough to conclude that Dannenfesler was lying with malicious intent, but rather she had not done her research when it came to the exact number. At this point, the options for directions to head in concerning the second half of Dannenfelser’s claim were slimming down, so the next thing I did was quickly search in Google in the hopes that it would lead to reliable sources that were relevant to my search. The search term I used was “How much of title x taxpayer funding goes to planned parenthood?” and it yielded some results that seemed promising, the first being a New York Times article. In this article, it stated that “Planned Parenthood receives about $60 million annually through the federal program, known as Title X.” To me, this confirmed that Marjorie Dannenfelser’s claims were true because the New York Times has a reputation of being consistently factual and reliable. However, to be sure, I checked Allsides.com to see what they had to say. I found that while Allsides rates the New York Times as left leaning, the confidence level is high. This confirmed what I assume most people think of the New York Times, that it is a reputable source with factual information. 

In conclusion, I believe it’s safe to say that the statement of fact made by Marjorie Dannenfelser in the Lifenews article is mostly true. Planned Parenthood does receive about $60 million a year in Title X taxpayer dollars. As for her claim that Planned Parenthood performs 332,000 abortions a year, this is not entirely true becasue the number is slightly off. This, relatively speaking, can be considered a small or large discrepancy based on the context. For our purposes, we’ll say that this isn’t a major difference. So, yes Lifenews.com is clearly a very biased source that is pro-life, but the claims that were investigated today are true.