(LifeSiteNews) — A purported news site funded by Bill Gates recently pushed the debunked idea that two Georgia women died because of the state’s restrictions on the killing of innocent preborn babies via abortion.
The Conversation claims to have “academic rigor” and “journalistic flair,” but only the latter appears in one recent article (and many other stories). The idea behind the website is to take academic research and condense it into easy-to-understand language for non-scholarly people. However, their articles can sound more like a Planned Parenthood news release than straight news stories or analyses.
One reason may be that they are funded by major universities and left-wing foundations. Funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation.
“Doctors are preoccupied with threats of criminal charges in states with abortion bans, putting patients’ lives at risk,” an October 25 headline claims.
It is written by two medical students and a professor of anthropology. The article is based on interviews with 22 “medical providers working in [so-called] reproductive health care.”
“A 2024 ProPublica investigation found that at least two women have died in Georgia as a result of being denied medical care stemming from the implementation of these abortion bans,” the “Why It Matters” section alleges. “Nearly all of our interviewees spoke about their fear that these kinds of deaths would happen.”
But two women did not die because of “abortion bans” – they died because of dangerous abortion drugs.
Amber Thurman traveled to North Carolina in 2022 to obtain abortion drugs to kill the twin babies growing inside her womb. Georgia prohibits abortion at six weeks, but she was nine weeks pregnant, as Live Action wrote in its analysis a month prior to The Conversation article.
She ultimately died of sepsis, as medical providers delayed using dilation and curettage to remove the babies.
Direct abortion is never medically necessary, and Georgia law provides for interventions on pregnant women, as long as the intent is not to end life.
Live Action concluded that ProPublica was engaging in pure speculation as to why the medical practitioners did not do the dilation and curettage. But politicians, like Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, ran with the story as proof of alleged “dangers” of limiting the intentional destruction of innocent human life in the womb. “Now we know that at least two women – and those are only the stories we know – here in the state of Georgia died – died because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris claimed in September.
A similar falsehood has been circulated about Candi Miller, another mother who tragically died due to taking abortion pills. ProPublica pushed the narrative that Miller died due to the state’s abortion laws. However, it had to acknowledge in its own article that a Georgia committee investigating the 2022 death did not believe she died because of the state’s abortion laws. She had high levels of fentanyl and other medication in her system, according to an investigation, as Live Action reported.
ProPublica reported she did not die because of the abortion pill – by interviewing the founder of the abortion pill business Aid Access, where Miller obtained the drugs.
Readers of The Conversation should be wary of any story about abortion coming from the site. While the articles are presented as simplified versions of complex stories, there is rarely, if ever, a story about abortion that does not push the left-wing agenda.
“Expanding abortion access strengthens democracy, while abortion bans signal broader repression – worldwide study,” a headline on October 24 reads.
Another article champions how “telehealth makes timely abortions possible for many,” using positive language to describe the intentional destruction of a unique human being.
The news site claims to have “academic rigor.” But if so, that must refer to the frequent plagiarism scandals and retraction issues in what passes today for academic scholarship.
It’s not really a “conversation” – just tale bearing under the guise of news.
