Donald Trump‘s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, may be new to her role as her boss’ mouthpiece. However, and as evidenced by clips from the last presidential election cycle, she played with the truth long before she joined team Trump. In a cable news clip from 2012 (which was discovered recently by the Democratic Coalition against Trump), Conway claimed that Democrats were promoting the practice of sex-selective abortions (the practice of ending a pregnancy based solely upon the gender of the fetus) in the United States.
In an Aug. 21, 2012 appearance on CNN, Conway was making the rounds to do damage control for her then-employer, Todd Akin, the former Republican congressman from Missouri who stoked outrage when he said that women’s bodies “have a way of shutting [pregnancy] down” in cases of “legitimate rape.”
“The Washington Post reported on Aug. 10 that there are Democrats who are going to the convention in Charlotte who want their plank expanded,” Conway said. “They feel that it’s too draconian. It doesn’t allow for partial birth abortion bans. It doesn’t ban sex selection. You’ve got all these little baby girls being killed just because they’re girls in this country.”
The above clip doesn’t show too much, but the old CNN transcript reveals how host Anderson Cooper asked, “Wait, what? Excuse me, where is that happening?” Conway replied that all of the information she was citing could be found in a Guttmacher Institute report. She then moved to the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. “The House just passed a bill to ban that,” Conway said. “I’m not sure it ever went to the Senate, and I’m sure President Obama would veto it if it was put on his desk.”
“But statistically, there’s not really much evidence that that is actually occurring in the United States,” Cooper replied. “Amongst some immigrant groups in small numbers it may be occurring, but in no statistical measure is it significant.” Conway disagreed, urging Anderson to look up the Guttmacher Institute report she was citing. So, during the break, he did.
“Before the break, Kellyanne, you mentioned the Guttmacher Institute information on sex-selective abortion in the United States,” Cooper said after the program came back from commercial. “Here’s what they actually say in a May 30 press release … The study acknowledges the practice does go on overseas, as we mentioned, and perhaps in certain Asian-American communities in the United States in small numbers. But, quote, ‘In the United States, meanwhile, there is limited data indicating that sex-selective abortion may be occurring in some Asian communities. Although the U.S. sex ratio at 1.05 males for every female is squarely within biologically normal parameters.’ So I just wanted to put that out there.”
