Like Hillary Clinton’s book of dirty tricks, an opponent claimed Georgia’s governor was prosecuting miscarriages as abortions under Georgia law.
Stacey Abrams, who lost a squeaker to incumbent Gov, Brian Kemp (R-GA), is trying to flip the script in November’s midterm election. She has almost $20 million more than Kemp and spent 10 times as much in political ads but still trails in the polls.
Her latest ads attacking Kemp for prosecuting victims of miscarriage have been deemed false by fact-checkers.
Townhall further reported:
It’s not often that the fact-checkers side with Republicans and their causes; often they’re the targets of the fact-checkers. So when they happen to get it right, it is a pretty big deal. This occurred last Friday, when PolitiFact rightfully declared a claim from Stacey Abrams “False” when it comes to how Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) “wants to investigate and punish women for having miscarriages.”
The fact-check points to ads from Facebook and Instagram as well as two television ads in which Abrams makes the false claim. Also cited is Mary Ziegler, a law professor at University of California, Davis, who is cited as “an abortion law expert,” though it turns out she’s not such an expert at all.
The six-week abortion law Kemp signed, which took effect July 20 but is being challenged in court, says miscarriage is legal.
Georgia’s law does not explicitly say women can’t be prosecuted. So, some legal experts say the law gives police discretion on investigating whether a woman had a miscarriage or an illegal abortion.
“There are other states where it really clearly says you cannot punish the person who had the abortion, period, and Georgia’s law is not clear in that way,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at University of California, Davis and an abortion law expert.
Therefore, women in Georgia could be investigated over a miscarriage, she said.
The video alludes to Georgia’s “heartbeat” law, which bans most abortions once a “detectable human heartbeat” exists at about six weeks of pregnancy. The law defines a miscarriage as a “spontaneous abortion” and says that removing “a dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion” is legal.
When Kemp signed the law in May 2019, we examined claims that women would be prosecuted. We found that the law neither spells out what happens to a woman who has an illegal abortion, nor directly says miscarriages can be investigated.
Making it even more damning for Abrams is that she was not very good at backing up her claims, not surprising, given that they’re false. “The Abrams campaign did not cite any instances of Kemp saying he wanted women to be investigated for miscarriages,” the fact-checker mentioned.
A recent FiveThirtyEight poll shows Gov. Kemp with slightly greater than a five-point lead over his Democrat challenger.
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