FactCheck.org calls out Foust for misrepresenting, distorting and exaggerating Comstock's position on abortion
Abortion Distortions 2014
Democratic Ads That Misrepresent GOP Positions
Posted on September 26, 2014
Analysis
In 2012, the Obama campaign repeatedly made the false claim that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was opposed to allowing abortions for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest. That wasn’t true, as we pointed out – again and again. Now, we are seeing the same tactic being used by Democrats in several 2014 House and Senate elections.
In race after race, Democratic ads are misrepresenting, distorting and exaggerating their Republican opponents’ position on abortion to make them seem more strict (and therefore less popular) than they really are.
A False Claim About ‘Rape and Incest’
This ad by John Foust, the Democratic nominee for the House in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, claims that Republican nominee Barbara Comstock “wants to make abortion illegal, even in cases of rape and incest.” But Comstock says the opposite: “I support a rape/incest/life of the mother exception on abortion,” she said in a statement relayed to us by her campaign.
And that’s not the first time Comstock has taken that position. She was asked specifically about where she stood on “abortion in cases of rape or incest” while seeking the endorsement of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List Candidate Fund in July. The fund normally doesn’t make its questionnaires public, but in this case the group sent a letter giving the full text of Comstock’s response. “I do support a life of the mother and rape and incest exception for abortion,” the SBA quoted Comstock as stating.
The Foust website provides no support for the ad’s claim. When we pressed for an explanation, a Foust aide told us the claim was based on Comstock’s 2012 vote in favor of a bill that some referred to as a “personhood” measure in the Virginia House of Delegates, where she is a member.
That bill, however, would not have banned any abortions, and did not even mention rape or incest. It would have declared that under Virginia law, “The life of each human being begins at conception” and that unborn children would have “all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons” in the state. But neither side claimed at the time that the bill would ban abortions in Virginia.
For one thing, the bill stated explicitly that the rights it would have granted to unborn children would be subject to “the Constitution of the United States and decisional interpretations thereof by the United States Supreme Court,” which has for more than 40 years held that states cannot outlaw abortion during the first months of a woman’s pregnancy. The Supreme Court first held that in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and reaffirmed that finding in the landmark 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Abortion foes who supported the bill expected far less of it than criminalizing abortions, but said it might have provided grounds for wrongful death lawsuits in some cases. “Had HB 1 been enacted, one practical effect would have been to create a wrongful death cause of action for the death of an unborn child in certain situations (for example, in instances of domestic violence),” said the Virginia Catholic Conference in a statement lamenting the bill’s failure. The bill passed the state House but later died in the state Senate.
Pro-abortion-rights groups didn’t go so far as to claim it would outlaw abortion, either. The worst that NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia said about it is that the “dangerous” measure would “lay the legal groundwork” to ban all abortions. But even if such “groundwork” was laid, Comstock states explicitly that she doesn’t favor banning abortion for victims of rape or incest as the Foust ad claims, and Foust has yet to produce any evidence that she does.
http://www.factcheck.org/2014/09/abortion-distortions-2014/