Just hours ahead of this evening’s first presidential debate, Planned Parenthood is demanding debate moderators fact check President Trump on issues of “abortion” and “systemic racism” in real-time.

Planned Parenthood Votes, the abortion industry political giant, led other leftwing organizations in a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates with the demand that debate moderators “fact-check and correct misinformation on abortion and systemic racism in real-time,” a press statement released Monday read.

In their statement, the groups complained that, in 2016, debate moderator Chris Wallace asked only one question about abortion but “used the medically inaccurate and stigmatizing rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement.”

The letter read:

We are reaching out ahead of the presidential and vice presidential debates with great excitement and anticipation, but also with significant concern regarding the impact of misinformation spread during these debates. To start, while we would hope that the debates be a place for thoughtful conversations of systemic racism in our justice system, we were incredibly disappointed to hear that the framing of one of the topics for the first debate is “race and violence in our cities.” Linking race and violence plays into the same racist stereotypes lifted by President Trump day in and day out. It’s this sort of rhetoric that brings about more violence at the hands of militiamen and white supremacists claiming to be fighting for the protection of private property. The perpetuation of this language and misinformation puts our bodies in danger and dehumanizes people of color.

An example of “misinformation” cited by the groups is “partial-birth abortion.”

“There is no such thing as a “partial-birth abortion” or “abortion up until birth” the abortion rights supporters claimed and added:

Attacks on abortion later in pregnancy are misleading and are not based in fact. They’re designed to confuse and manipulate people. Every pregnancy is different. Abortion that occurs later in pregnancy is often for complicated reasons. Sometimes a person may experience a health crisis or the pregnancy cannot survive. Other times, a person may not be able to get an abortion as soon as they decide because politicians have placed obstacles in the way of care, such as the discriminatory Hyde Amendment or the executive orders Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and others signed, banning abortion at the beginning of the pandemic.

Abortion rights proponents have often claimed late-term abortions usually occur due to health risks to the mother or fetal anomalies.

The problem with the claim is that abortionists themselves have been saying it is false for decades.

Several weeks ago, a coalition of black leaders wrote to the CEO of Planned Parenthood to urge her “to confront the systemic racism of America’s abortion practices” and to “renounce the racist legacy” of her organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger.

Rev. Dean Nelson, executive director of Human Coalition Action, tweeted, “For years, Planned Parenthood has targeted minorities with abortion. It’s the fulfillment of Margaret Sanger’s racist & eugenics agenda”:

Nevertheless, on Monday, the co-chair of the Presidential Debate Commission reaffirmed it is not the job of the moderator to perform real-time fact checking of a candidate’s statements.

Frank Fahrenkopf told anchor Sandra Smith that moderators and interviewers have different roles:

There’s a great difference being moderator in a debate and being an interviewer. For example, If I was running for office, and you were interviewing me, and I stated something that was totally wrong compared to what I said a week ago, okay, I just change my position, you as a reporter doing an interview would follow up, and “say wait a minute Frank, you said something totally different a week ago.” But that’s not the role of the moderator in the debate. We want to debate between the two principles. They’re the ones we want to go back and forth at each other, and the moderator should be a facilitator.

“It’s not our job to be fact-checkers,” Fahrenkopf stressed. “We are to present the candidates, they make their arguments, the facilitators, the moderator, and we go from there.”

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