Abortion Up Under Bush?

I've heard this a few times, and you probably have too: After a steady decline during the Clinton Presidency, abortions are up since 2001 under the Bush administration. DNC Chairman Howard Dean repeated the charge Tuesday on Meet the Press: "You know that abortions have gone up 25 percent since George Bush was President?" he asked Tim Russert.

Turns out to be false. Abortions have continued to consistently drop under Bush. Where did this myth start? When Glen Harold Stassen, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, made an analysis based on 16 states for Sojourners magazine. His counter-intuitive conclusion, proclaimed a month before the 2004 election, was too convenient not to be employed by opponents of his policies, who understandably assumed the data was solid. Turns out it wasn't. The respected Guttmacher Institute launched their own investigation (involving 43 states) and found a modest decline in abortions under Bush. But are they a pawn of the administration?

No. And here I'll defer to FactCheck.org:

Guttmacher has little motive to make Bush and his anti-abortion policies look good. The institute was founded in 1968 in honor of a former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and describes its mission as being" to protect the reproductive choice of all women and men in the United States and throughout the world.”

Ironically, a pro-life seminary professor had the integrity to draw attention to data supporting pro-choice talking points...and a pro-choice institute had the integrity to proclaim his findings false. If only the discussion on abortion could be conducted in as fair and civil a manner as the research...