During the recent debate over federal funding for Planned Parenthood— which operates more than 800 centers providing health- and reproductive-related services for women– Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona said:
“Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”
Unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with the real Planned Parenthood– as opposed to the rightwing fantasy version– it turns out that abortions are actually about 3 percent of of the services it provides.
Questioned about this remarkable discrepancy, Sen. Kyl’s office issued a statement that deserves to be remembered as long as there are politicians who make stuff up.
“[Kyl’s] remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions.”
The great Stephen Colbert has been Tweeting not-intended-to-be-factual statements about Kyl ever since.
