Well, smack my butt and call me Sally. The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker, the home of the infamous True but False rating of an RNC critique of Obama’s economic policy, actually took the time to rate a claim by radical pro-abort group NARAL Pro-Choice America (note that the million babies killed each year at the behest of this modern day priesthood of Moloch don’t get a choice) and found it to be a big, fat, hideous lie.

The issue is a mailer by NARAL that makes the same claim that their Fuehrer President, Ilyse Hogue, made in her speech at the Democrat Convention.

About one in three American women have abortions by the age of 45, and the majority are mothers just trying to take care of the families they already have.

When you look at it, it looks incredible. Pick out three random women in your church, one of them has to have had an abortion before age 45. Same for your family. Or as a two-star general once told me about something in one of my briefing charts, “I don’t mean ‘incredible’ like ‘wow’, I mean ‘incredible’ like ‘bullsh**’.”

Each year about 700,000 infants are slaughtered in the United States. The actual numbers aren’t all that clear because not all states report their data, but, as they say, 700K is close enough for government work. (If you are interested, check the CDC’s Abortion Surveillance report.)

Our base number, according to the Census Bureau, is 62.3 million women aged 15-45. Right away you notice the problem. If there are 62.3 million women and 700K abortions, that means, literally, that there is one abortion for every 89 women. How in the hell do you get to 33%.

But as you age the population a that number increases. That 62.3 million women is broken down into 31 age cohorts, that is, women aged 15 and 16 and 17, etc. So each year you lose a little more than 2,000,000 women as they age out, i.e. become 46, and you gain another 2,000,000 who are now 15. If we look at the entire pool of women of child bearing age over the period of time NARAL is focusing on, there are actually 124 million women who are in this 15-45 age group over the 31 years in question. And there are about 22,000,000 abortions raising the proportion of women who have had an abortion to one in six . Not one in three, but still damned high.*

However, we know that a lot of women have more than one abortion. In fact, 44% of women who have abortions have had at least two. 8.6% have had four or more. So what we are interested in, by NARAL’s argument, is the number of women have had at least one abortion by age 45. That number comes to just over 12 million, or one in ten. Still as helluva lot of dead babies but not one in three women.

At this point it gets into more math than either of us are ready to deal with because a woman who has has 4 or more abortions by age 45 already appears in the data as having had 3 and 2 and 1. And data on previous abortions is self-reported by the patient so there is no way of knowing how accurate this number is or if some women, rightfully, feel a stigma attaches to having multiple abortions. So the 12 million number represents a ceiling on the number of women who have had at least one abortion. Math and logic tells you that number is substantially smaller.

The Washington Post is sympathetic to the propaganda point being made by the pro-aborts but even so, they can’t go along with it. And when the Washington Post calls out the pro-aborts on their lies, there is truly a sea change happening in that newsroom.

*Actually, I understate the population, as it increases each year, and overstate abortions, where the rate goes down each year, but, for the sake of example I am assuming a steady state on both variables.