Chai Feldblum and Kevin Jennings aren’t the only Obama administration officials WorldNetDaily has told lies about.
A July 11 WND article by Drew Zahn asserted that John Holdren, the administration’s science czar, “advocated … compulsory abortions in the U.S.” in a textbook he co-wrote in the 1970s. In fact, Holdren was merely repeating a claim that compulsory population-control measures, including abortion, “could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society”
Even the right-wing Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid found that to be an egregious distortion of the facts, pointing out that “while Holdren can be criticized for including this reference to compulsory abortion, it cannot be said, strictly speaking, that it is necessarily his view.”
Nevertheless, WND continued to push the false claim. A July 25 column by Matt Barber asserted that “Holdren has advocated … forced abortion,” a statement uncritically quoted by Bob Unruh in a July 31 article. A Sept. 8 column by Janet Porter asserted that Holdren “wants forced abortions.”
A Sept. 21 article by Jerome Corsi tried to spin the lie. After noting that PolitiFact pointed out that “the authors make clear that they did not support coercive means of population control. Clearly, nowhere in the book do the authors advocate forced abortions,”Corsi adds: “A close reading of ‘Ecoscience,’ however, shows the authors clearly stated their acceptance of abortion as an effective population-control technique.” But “acceptance” is not the same thing as advocacy.
Still, in an Oct. 10 article, Corsi wrote that Holdren “advocated abortion as a means of population control.”