Planned Parenthood

While Planned Parenthood officials claim that abortions constitute only 4% of their services, this figure is misleading. Out of the 9.2 million individual services they provided in 2021, 374,155 were abortions — roughly 4%. But this figure fails to account for the fact that a woman visiting Planned Parenthood for an abortion will receive several services — from a pregnancy test to some manner of counseling to the abortion itself — each of which is counted separately.

A closer look at Planned Parenthood’s client and income numbers shows that the abortion figure is actually more than three times what they claim. Out of 2.13 million Planned Parenthood clients in 2021, 18% got abortions. Moreover, abortion accounts for more than half of Planned Parenthood’s total non-government paid income from clinic services.

See also What is Planned Parenthood’s share of the U.S. abortion market? and How much money does Planned Parenthood make on abortion?

Planned Parenthood performs 40% of all abortions in the United States, making them the industry leader in abortion. By comparison, other U.S. market leaders have far less a share of their respective markets — like General Motors (17% of automobiles), Samsung (22% of televisions), and Southwest Airlines (19% of domestic air travel).

Since abortion was made legal across the United States in 1973, hundreds of women have been killed as a direct consequence of abortion, many of them at Planned Parenthood facilities. In one example, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Chicago, Illinois, perforated the uterus of a 24-year-old woman named Tonya Reaves, leading to her death from hemorrhage. No 911 call was ever placed by Planned Parenthood, and there was an inexplicable delay of over five hours between the abortion and her admission to the ER. Her family sued Planned Parenthood for malpractice and was awarded a $2 million settlement in 2014.

See also If you make abortion illegal, women will die.

Moreover, Planned Parenthood consistently opposes state measures that would make their centers safer by requiring them to conform to the same safety standards as other surgical centers.

Planned Parenthood’s income from abortion in 2021 was approximately $228 million.

See also What is Planned Parenthood’s annual budget? 

For fiscal year 2021–2022, the total revenue reported by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates was $1,906,700,000 — nearly two billion dollars.

Planned Parenthood is comprised of a national headquarters — the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) — and 49 affiliates across the United States. Each Planned Parenthood affiliate operates local facilities in a given state or region. In all, the affiliates operate nearly 600 individual facilities.

The Planned Parenthood Global program — not to be confused with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, a separate organization — operates in 10 countries in Africa and Latin America. Planned Parenthood operates its own facilities in these countries as well as partnering with existing medical institutions to advance contraception and abortion in the developing world.

Finally, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund Political Action Committee lobbies on behalf of Planned Parenthood’s agenda in the halls of government, seeking to keep abortion unrestricted by law, win funding for Planned Parenthood affiliates, and support pro-choice candidates.

Planned Parenthood presents itself as an indispensable partner in the American health care system. However, their own numbers show they provide only a narrow range of services to less than 1% of the U.S. population each year.

Despite Planned Parenthood’s name, prenatal care amounts to less than 0.1% of their total annual services. They provide less than 1% of manual breast exams each year, less than 1% of pap tests, and zero mammograms. They make only 1% of annual STD diagnoses.

Planned Parenthood does not provide such basic healthcare as treatment for diabetes, back pain, colds and flus, bodily injury, or mental health issues. They offer little to no pediatric care, and some centers even instruct parents not to bring children with them to appointments.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates received $670,400,000 in taxpayer dollars during the 2021–2022 fiscal year, the most recent year for which data is available. Public funds thus constitute over one third of Planned Parenthood’s annual revenues.

Planned Parenthood officials frequently claim that they want to reduce abortion by providing contraceptives, but the belief that making contraceptives widely available will reduce abortion is not supported by the facts.

See also If you really want to reduce abortion, why don’t you hand out contraceptives?

Planned Parenthood officials frequently declare that one of their central missions is to provide high-quality, low-cost contraceptives, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Condoms distributed by Planned Parenthood were rated among the worst available in a study by Consumer Reports magazine. And Planned Parenthood has been exposed for dramatically overcharging their clients for Plan B
emergency contraception; pills purchased for $4.25 to $4.50 were resold for $25 to $32 — a markup of 400–600%.

See also If you really want to reduce abortion, why don’t you hand out contraceptives?

Planned Parenthood lists adoption referrals as one of the services they provide, but evidence from their own internal reporting reveals that adoption is a very low priority for them. For 2021, Planned Parenthood reported only one adoption referral for every 207 abortions. In one annual report, they didn’t even list the number of adoption referrals.

See also How many children have you adopted? There are too many unwanted children now!

Planned Parenthood opposes all sexual risk avoidance (SRA) programs, previously known as abstinence education programs. In spite of the growing evidence that such programs are highly effective, Planned Parenthood actively opposes any program endorsing the message that sex should be reserved exclusively for marriage. They insist that such issues as premarital sex, contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, and abortion must be presented as personal choices without any inherent moral character.

Planned Parenthood strongly opposes laws requiring parental involvement in minor girls’ abortions, even though such laws are supported by 70% of the American public. Though parental approval is required for a minor girl to get her ears pierced or take an aspirin dispensed by the school nurse, Planned Parenthood insists parents have no right to know if their daughters get abortions.

See also What legal restrictions on abortion have states enacted?

There is mounting evidence that Planned Parenthood facilities routinely fail to report cases of statutory rape and child sex trafficking, They have even been caught coaching underage girls on how to procure abortions while avoiding mandatory reporting and parental involvement laws. Undercover videos gathered by independent investigators suggest this may be standard Planned Parenthood practice nationwide.

In July 2015, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began releasing a series of undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the harvesting and selling of fetal tissue procured from abortions with citizen journalists who were posing as representatives of a company seeking fetal tissue for medical experimentation. The videos included negotiations over the prices of various fetal organs, as well as descriptions of how the abortion procedure could be modified to maximize the quality of organs harvested — both possible violations of the law.

The tone of these conversations was so disturbing that Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards issued a public apology, and later announced that, while the organization would continue to provide fetal tissue for medical experiments, they would no longer be accepting reimbursement for any costs involved.

Many mainstream media reporters and abortion advocates have attempted to dismiss the CMP videos, calling them “heavily edited.” However, aside from the fact that news agencies routinely edit footage acquired during investigations to highlight their key findings, CMP also publicly released the raw footage of their investigations to support their claims about Planned Parenthood’s role in harvesting and selling fetal tissue. Moreover, an independent analysis by the cybersecurity firm Coalfire Systems verified the authenticity of the CMP videos, an analysis accepted as conclusive by a federal court.

Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a strong advocate of eugenics — the policy of preventing certain races, classes or groups from procreating in order to “improve” the genetic stock of a society. Sanger wrote about the need to control the population of blacks and other minorities through contraception and sterilization. In her 1932 “Plan for Peace,” Sanger stated that the U.S. should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race.” Sanger has also been criticized for speaking on birth control to the Women’s Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey in 1926.

While Planned Parenthood today repudiates racism, they continue to target their services disproportionately to minority populations. While blacks comprise only 14% of the population, 28% of women in the United States having abortions are black, due in no small part to Planned Parenthood’s conscious placement of many of their facilities in neighborhoods primarily populated by minorities. In fact, more blacks are killed in the womb at Planned Parenthood facilities in three days than were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in their entire history.

An undercover investigation in 2008 showed Planned Parenthood officials across the country gladly accepting donations being offered by a man who claimed he specifically wanted his donation to go towards abortions for black women, in order to reduce the black population.