On Wednesday, Indiana Governor Mike Pence (R) signed a measure that is solely intended to shut down abortion clinics, and will almost certainly force one of the state’s Planned Parenthood health centers to stop providing abortion care. And as the governor added his signature to the legislation, he justified his support for the new clinic restrictions by repeating a scientifically inaccurate talking point about early abortion services.

Indiana’s new law is part of a broad national trend to indirectly limit women’s reproductive access by attacking abortion providers, imposing unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics under the guide of “protecting women’s safety.” So it’s no surprise that Pence justified his decision to sign the anti-choice bill into law by relying on this type of logic.

But the governor went a step further, asserting that the tightened clinic rules are necessary because the mifepristone abortion pill — a method that allows women to safely terminate an early pregnancy without undergoing a surgical procedure — is actually a “dangerous” medical practice. “Abortion-inducing drugs can be very dangerous, and must be prescribed under conditions that ensure proper medical care,” Pence said in a statement. “This new law helps accomplish that goal. I applaud both chambers of the General Assembly for passing this legislation.”

That assertion is not actually based in scientific fact. The abortion pill is an FDA-approved medication that has been used safely around the world since 1981. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends mifepristone as a “highly effective” method of terminating a pregnancy within the first 9 weeks. Several studies have found that the rate of complications for this type of early abortion service is less than two tenths of a percent.

And medical experts agree that unnecessary abortion clinic regulations, like Indiana’s new law, don’t actually accomplish the goal of keeping women safer — in fact, they actually do just the opposite. “Anyone who talks about the dangers of abortion is just blowing smoke,” Dr. David Grimes, the former chief of abortion surveillance at the CDC, recently told Bloomberg Businessweek. “These kinds of regulations do nothing to advance women’s health. All they do is drive up the cost of care and cause women to delay, which drives up the risks.”

Nevertheless, abortion opponents have worked hard to obscure the scientific realities of abortion by conflating illegal, incredibly late-term surgical procedures with first-trimester medication services. Anti-choice activists often attempt to play to Americans’ emotions by making the case that every single abortion procedure is a violent, invasive act — even though that’s not actually rooted in fact, since nearly 90 percent of all abortions occur in the first trimester.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) joined several of his Republican colleagues today in touting proposed legislation that would ban physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’s race or sex. Like most of the bill’s white male sponsors, Pence has suddenly developed a sense of outrage at discrimination against minorities — but only if those minorities are fetuses.

During the Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the bill, Pence claimed, “I say with a heavy heart that abortion is now the leading cause of death in the black community,” and equated abortion with slavery and the legislation with the struggle for civil rights and women’s equality:

Watch it:

The loftily-named Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) purports to somehow protect the “civil rights” of fetuses. In reality, it’s an opportunity for Republicans to denigrate the “family values” and character of communities of color that typically have higher abortion rates because of inadequate health insurance and poor sex education, among other reasons.

Pretending that terminated pregnancies cause more death and suffering than illness or violence is to be willfully ignorant of those ravages on the black community. The actual leading causes of death among African Americans include heart disease, cancer, stroke, homicide, and HIV/AIDS. According to the CDC, there are striking health disparities between blacks and other racial groups because of discrimination and lack of access to health care.

Because of inadequate health care, the AIDS rate among African Americans rivals that of some African countries. Homicide — often related to gang violence — is the leading cause of black males ages 12 to 19 years old.

If Republicans really wanted to do something to curb unnecessary deaths in the black community, they should improve access to health care, take on inner-city gang violence and provide more mentoring and education opportunities for young blacks — initiatives they have shown no interest in and have sought to defund.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is frustrated with Republican colleagues who are not more outraged about the alleged “bombshell” of $105 billion in mandatory spending included in the health care law. “This is something that wasn’t known,” Bachmann said on Meet The Press on Sunday. “This money was broken up, hidden in various parts of the bill.” This afternoon, during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Bachmann expressed disappointment that Republicans in Congress were failing to heed her alarm:

BACHMANN: I have to say I feel disheartened in that I’m not sensing a lot of outrage about this by other members or…hopefully they just don’t yet know or they just don’t yet realize because the marvelous opportunity we have is within the next week and a half we can get this funding back for Obamacare and effectively repeal it for the next two years if we get this money back, but we got to demand that we put the language in, that we’ve already written, on the next continuing resolution….we can do this, but I’m not sensing yet within the Republicans here in Congress a willingness to do that. It’s inexplicable to me…It’s like we’re in the Twilight zone here. I’m thinking, am I the only one who remembers there was no discussion of this $105 billion?

Listen:

Republicans may be less than surprised about Bachmann’s ‘revelations’ because the mandatory spending was, in fact, openly discussed in the various Congressional Budget Office estimates of health care reform and by Democrats hoping to protect the law from defunding. For instance, this CBO estimate from December 19, 2009 addressed the effects of “mandatory appropriations” for the Prevention and Public Health Fund,” “community health centers” and “the National Health Service Corps.” In an earlier document from November 2009, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf writes, “For example, the House bill would finance the operations of the insurance exchanges through mandatory appropriations rather than a surcharge on the plans offered in the exchanges. ” (The word “mandatory” is used throughout this CBO compilation of health care related documents).

As Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) explained to Hannity after Bachmann’s appearance, “with the advanced appropriations they built in there, it exists outside the normal appropriations process, but tell me something I don’t know.” “I don’t think nobody noticed it, I thought most of the estimates we were working off of were….all of our estimates were over the next 10 years,” he added.

In February, Republicans on the House Rules Committee refused to grant a waiver, requested by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), “for the consideration of an amendment to the 2011 funding bill that would bar mandatory spending” for the health law. House rules stipulate that “members cannot legislate on appropriations bills,” which King’s amendment would have done by eliminating $105 billion in mandatory spending from the health law. Republicans on the committee argued that the party would be better served by focusing on the $100 billion in cuts offered in the GOP’s continuing resolution proposal and suggested that King’s amendment would be dead on arrival in the Senate and would therefore jeopardize the party’s cherished spending cuts.