A leftist fake 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.