One of the most annoying things about David Barton, aside from his incessant tendency to blindside his co-host Rick Green by asking him questions to which he could not possibly be expected to know the answer, is the fact that Barton rarely bothers to cite any source for the answers that he provides (nor for the “facts” that make up his historical presentations, for that matter).
We have become convinced that one of the reasons Barton generally does not provide the source of his “facts” is because, if he did, people might actually go and look them up on their own and realize that Barton cannot be trusted to accurately relay information because of his tendency to utterly misrepresent even the simplest of facts.
On today’s “Wallbuilders Live,” Barton once again provided a perfect example of this when he claimed that three-quarters of all abortions performed in America are done on young women ages sixteen and under:
Barton: What demographic group accounts for the largest percentage of abortions? Let me give you [a hint]: this demographic group accounts for seventy-five percent of all abortions …
Green: I’m going to guess over [the age of] thirty?
Barton: Nope. Gotta go the other way. Seventy-five percent of all abortions are performed on teenagers below the age of sixteen … Remember, one of the problems we have with abortion clinics is they do not report statutory rape, they do abortions instead. So a young girl comes in pregnant at eleven or twelve or thirteen, that’s supposed to be reported as statutory rape because it’s well below the age of consent but rather than reporting it, they simply do an abortion … You have seventy-five percent of all abortions being performed on teens who are sixteen and under.
The figure that Barton cites (or rather, misrepresents) comes from a recent report and presentation from the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute which found that “almost 3/4 of abortions are to women who initiated sex at age 16 or younger – 40% of women who begin sexual intercourse very early (12-13-14) will have abortions.”
The report did not find, as Barton asserted, that three-quarters of all abortions are done on women under the age of sixteen, but rather that almost three-quarters of women who have had abortions became sexually active at the age of sixteen or before.
That is obviously a pretty significant difference and one that “a former math teacher” like Barton ought to understand … provided, of course, that Barton actually cares about providing accurate information, which certainly does not seem to be a priority for him.
