Saddleback Civil Forum: on Abortion

Barack Obama: FactCheck: Abortions HAVE gone down under Pres. Bush

This is an erroneous claim that we first tracked down and debunked more than three years ago when it was being repeated by Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton, among others.

The Guttmacher Institute, whose figures are cited regularly by both sides in the abortion debate, say on their Web site, “In 2005, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million abortions in 2000.”

There’s little to show the decline has come about because of anything President Bush did or didn’t do. In fact, the number of abortions in the U.S. has been falling steadily since the 1980s regardless of whether the person in the White House favored a legal right to abortion or opposed it.