Would a North Carolina bill permit people to "murder women for using birth control"? Truth-O-Meter unavailable for comment

 Do Democrats ever make false claims?

If we judge by PolitiFact, falsehoods from Democrats have nearly been eliminated. The last "Pants on Fire" rating for a Democrat was from the summer of 2024. So far in 2026, only one claim from a Democrat has received a rating below "Mostly False."

In reality, however, Democrats likely lie about the same rate these days that they did in 2012, when PolitiFact recorded 135 falsehoods, combining the 109 "False" ratings with the 26 "Pants on Fire" ratings.

A big part of that drop in volume stems from the extinction of many of PolitiFact's state franchises, especially PolitiFact Wisconsin. And Meta's decision to end its partnerships with fact-checking organizations surely affects the number of fact checks published. But at the same time, PolitiFact has apparently just lost interest in issuing harsh ratings for Democrats.

One of the very few remaining franchises, PolitiFact North Carolina, provides our example.

A North Carolina Republican sponsored a bill that would declare life begins at conception. PolitiFact Carolina published an article--not a "Truth-O-Meter" fact check--mentioning a number of claims made about the bill.

That's where selection bias comes in.

When a number of Republicans weigh in on a subject, PolitiFact routinely picks the most extreme statement and publishes a harsh Truth-O-Meter rating.

The PolitiFact North Carolina story has an excellent candidate for a false (or worse?) rating:

The article takes up the issue of murdering birth control users in its latter half. PolitiFact itself passes no judgment on the "murder" claim. Instead, the story explains terms and leaves the judgment up to one of its cited experts:

Hamilton said in her video that the bill would allow people to "murder women for using birth control." Tracy Weitz, professor at American University and senior fellow with the Women's Initiative at American Progress, referred to that claim as "extreme" and "hyperbolic."

PolitiFact North Carolina quote Weitz again a few paragraphs later:

"Yes, contraception works to prevent pregnancy as currently defined," Weitz said. "However, some extreme religious perspectives define contraception as abortion using a religious not medical definition." Still, the allegation that the bill would allow people to murder someone for using birth control is "very farfetched," she said. 

"As a scientist, I try to avoid these kind of extreme hyperbolic statements," Weitz said.

Weitz almost makes the claim sound like it's earned a "Pants on Fire" rating.

Jen Hamilton, on whose claim PolitiFact North Carolina focused, holds no office and so would not count as a politician in our tracking of Democrat falsehoods. But Sophia Chitlik would:

"This session, we've seen legislation in the General Assembly that would allow people to murder women if they prevent fertilization," Chitlik said.

There's a potential harsh rating for a Democrat, just short of the PolitiFact North Carolina finish line.

Chitlik has no "Truth-O-Meter" ratings as we write this.

                                                                                                                         

PolitiFact North Carolina struggles with Twitter context

PolitiFact North Carolina's "Pants on Fire" rating awarded to the North Carolina Republican Party on Dec. 29, 2020 likely caps the data for our study of PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" bias. And it gives us the opportunity to show again how PolitiFact struggles to properly apply interpretive principles when looking at Republican claims.

"Democrat Governor @RoyCooperNC has not left the Governor's Mansion since the start of the #COVID19 crisis," the party tweeted on Dec. 27.

Compared to similar claims and barbs, this particular tweet stood out.

That's PolitiFact's presentation of the GOP tweet. The only elaboration occurs in the summary section ("If Your Time Is Short") and later in the story when addressing the explanation from North Carolina GOP spokesperson Tim Wigginton.

Here's that section of the story (bold emphasis added):

Party spokesman Tim Wigginton told PolitiFact NC that the tweet is not meant to be taken literally.

"The tweet is meant metaphorically," Wigginton said, adding that it’s meant to critique the frequency of Cooper’s visits with business owners. He accused Cooper of living "in a bubble … instead of meeting with people devastated by his orders." 

The NC GOP’s tweet gave no indication that the party was calling on Cooper to meet with business owners.

The part in bold is the type of line that attracts a fact checker of fact checkers. 

Was there no indication the tweet was not intended literally?

It turns out that finding something worth widening the investigation merely took clicking the link to the GOP tweet.

I don't see how to embed the tweet, but here's the image accompanying the tweet:

It should strike anyone, even a left-biased fact checker, that the "Where's Cooper" comical graphic is a bit of a strange marriage for the claim Cooper hasn't left the governor's mansion.

That enough isn't enough to take Wigginton at his word, perhaps, but as we noted it does point toward a need for more investigation.

It turns out that the NCRP has tweeted out the image repeatedly in late December, accompanied by a number of statements.

Twitter counts as a new literary animal. Individual tweets are necessarily short on context. Twitter users may provide context a number of ways, such a creating a thread of linked tweets. Or tweeting periodically on a theme. The NCRP "Where's Cooper?" series seems to qualify as the latter. The tweets are tied together contextually by the "Where's Cooper" image, which provides a comical and mocking approach to the series of tweets.

In short, it looks like Wigginton has support for his explanation, and the PolitiFact fact checker, Paul Specht, either didn't notice or did not think the context was important enough to share with his readers.

It's okay for PolitiFact to nitpick whether Cooper had truly refrained from leaving the governor's mansion. The GOP tweets may have left a false impression on that point. But PolitiFact just as surely left a false impression that Wigginton's explanation had no grounding in fact. Specht didn't even mention the Waldo parody image.

"Pants on Fire"?

Hyperbole. Does PolitiFact have a license for hyperbole?

We want Bill Adair subjected to the "Flip-O-Meter"

It wasn't that long ago we reported on Bill Adair's article for Columbia Journalism Review declaring "Bias is good" along with a chart indicating fact-check journalism has more opinion to it than either investigative reporting or news analysis.

Yet WRAL, in announcing its new partnership with PolitiFact North Carolina, quoted Adair saying PolitiFact is unbiased:

“What is important about PolitiFact is not just that it’s not biased,” Adair said, “but that we show our work and that we show all of our sources.”

Naturally we cannot allow that to pass. We used WRAL's contact form to reach out to the writer of the article, Ashley Talley.

We pointed out the discrepancy between what Talley reported from Adair and what Adair wrote for Columbia Journalism Review. We suggested somebody should fact check Adair.

Next we'll be contacting Paul Specht of PolitiFact North Carolina over this quotation:

“One thing I love about PolitiFact is that the format is very structured and it's not up to me to decide what is or isn't true,” said Paul Specht, WRAL’s PolitiFact reporter who has been covering local, state and national politics for years. “It's up to me to go do the research and then it's up to the research to tell us what is true.”

We're not sure how that's supposed to square with Adair's declaration from a few years ago that "Lord knows the decision about a Truth-O-Meter rating is entirely subjective."

What changed?

In addition to its "Truth-O-Meter" PolitiFact publishes "Flip-O-Meter" items.

We'd like to see Adair on the Flip-O-Meter.