Remember Jon Kyl's abortion fantasy? In 2011, Kyl (R-Arizona) famously said on the floor of the Senate that Planned Parenthood spends "well over 90 percent" of its time performing abortions. When it was pointed out that the actual number was around 3 percent, Kyl's spokesman responded by saying the comment 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."
Kyl was widely mocked for this, but it did not hurt his standing among pro-lifers. Being right (as in, factual) matters less to them than being in the right—Planned Parenthood is the enemy; providing abortions might as well be all they do. Never mind that it is very little of what they do. The devil is not in the details.
Details, in fact, only get in the way. Cuts to state funding for Planned Parenthood in Texas in 2011 caused 56 clinics to close and over 130,000 women to lose access to health services in a state that already ranks near the bottom in quality of health care. A 2012 Susan J. Komen Foundation plan to cut grants for breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood would have denied thousands of low-income women access to this life-saving procedure. In subsequent coverage of this issue in the conservative media, the outrage over denying poor women breast screenings is largely edited out; the controversy is framed as an attempt by pro-abortion activists to sabotage Komen for trying to defund an abortion-providing operation.
Why The Lies?
The focus on a pure ideal—abortion is murder—makes it less important to be accurate about what things are than about what they represent. Ideological purity is a great motivator. It strips away doubt and nuance, leaving a clear narrative and focused, single-minded goal. But this is also its greatest weakness, because the real world is full of nuance and complexity, which is why conservatives feel undermined at every turn. Hence the hatred of "mainstream media," "big science" and other culture-war bogeymen, including large swaths of government and academia.More Impure Thoughts
If abortion is murder, pure and simple, then killing a fetus is equivalent to killing Jews in the Holocaust—a comparison made often by pro-life activists. In reality, this comparison is nonsense. The death of a fetus, however traumatic, is nothing to the death of a sentient, cognizant person. No one, not even the staunchest pro-life supporter, believes a mother should mourn a miscarriage the same way she mourns the death of a child.In actual practice, purity breaks down.
According to the Old Testament, Exodus 21:22-25, if a woman is killed in the course of a brawl between two people, the one who killed her must be killed. If she is pregnant, and the brawl injures her and causes her to miscarry, the guilty party must pay a fine. Fetuses, in other words, are not equivalent to born people. In this case, for pro-lifers, the purity of an idea must be given precedence over the reality of the Bible.
Given these complications, you would think pro-lifers would have some sympathy for other viewpoints. But purity brooks no quarter for differing positions. It does not allow for heterodoxy, and judges the legitimacy of differing belief systems on their relative similarity to its own. Purity is threatened by change and difference—it's not enough that True Believers are not themselves compelled to support or practice abortion; these practices cannot be tolerated among others, because doing so would taint an inviolable ideal.
