“I’ve been in hospitals in Brazil, where half the women were enthusiastically and joyfully greeting new babies and the other half were fighting for their lives against botched abortions.”

That’s what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed April 23, appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

She made the claim in the context of providing an explanation of why she believes in, and promotes, an international “reproductive right” to abortion.

This claim caught the Daily Blog’s eye. We’re wondering whether Clinton can actually back up her claim to have visited hospitals, in Brazil or anywhere else, where half the women patients were being treated for the life-threatening consequences of “botched abortions.”

Clinton has a long history of rhetorical extravagance. This trait was perhaps most notably displayed with Clinton’s claim during the 2008 presidential campaign that she had to dodge gunfire on a military runway in Tuzla, Bosnia, when visiting there in 1996 as First Lady during Bosnia’s civil war. Facing media scrutiny of the truth of this claim, a spokesman for Clinton subsequently acknowledged she had “misspoken” about the nonexistent event.

The Register put in a call today to the press office of the U.S. Department of State, requesting details about when and where the Brazilian hospital visits cited by Clinton occurred. 

The reason for our skepticism is twofold: One, given how many other serious health problems exist, it just seems unlikely that half of the female patients in any hospital anywhere were admitted for treatment of the consequences of illegal abortions.

And two, the international abortion lobby has sought consistently to inflate the number of deaths associated with illegal abortion. Go here to read an account by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the former abortionist and co-founder of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) who later converted to pro-life and to Catholicism, about how he and other abortion lobbyists fabricated wildly inflated abortion mortality figures in the late 1960s to drum up support for their campaign to legalize abortion in the United States.

And go here for information about why prominent demographer Joseph Chamie, the former head of the United Nations’ statistics office, refuses to use the U.N.’s own figure of 500,000 maternal deaths annually related to illegal abortion because the figure can’t be substantiated and is completely unreliable.

Maybe, against the odds, Clinton really did visit a number of hospitals in Brazil that were half-filled with women suffering from life-threatening injuries caused by illegal abortions. If so, Secretary Clinton, please provide us with the information about which hospitals you visited so that we can check with those hospitals to verify the accuracy of your claim.