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NRL News
Page 22
April 2009
Volume 36
Issue 5

Planned Parenthood’s Latest Annual Report:
Abortions at America’s Billion-Dollar Abortion Chain
Nearly Double in Past 10 Years
BY Randall K. O'Bannon, Ph.D.

According to its latest annual report, clinics affiliated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) performed 305,310 abortions in 2007, an all-time record for the nation’s largest abortion provider. While the number of abortions in the U.S. has dropped nearly every year since the 1990 peak of 1.6 million, they have consistently been on the increase at PPFA. In fact, they have nearly doubled in the last 10 years from 165,174 in 1997.

Today, Planned Parenthood is responsible for more than a quarter of all abortions performed annually in the United States. While Planned Parenthood tries to minimize the centrality of abortion to its mission, the 2007–08 report clearly shows that the promotion and performance of abortion remains at the core of Planned Parenthood’s business and mission.

Abortion as Only 3% of PPFA Services?

An increasingly common PPFA response is to say that abortion represents only 3% of all the services they provided in 2007. Technically, one can say this if every packet of pills, every test, every exam a client receives is counted as a separate service. But looked at in a more normal way, trying to see what percentage of Planned Parenthood’s customers receive abortions, we get a figure closer to 10.1%. Even that doesn’t capture the full impact.

Abortion is quite often bundled with a number of those other services (the abortion patient often receives and pays for a number of connected services, such as Rh testing, ultrasound, STD testing, the HPV vaccine, a take-home pack of contraceptives). Thus, abortion and abortion-related services account for a much, much bigger piece of the pie than 3% or even 10%.

Consider PPFA’s $374.7 million clinic income for the fiscal year ending June 2008.

Though we know from its own web site that there are Planned Parenthood clinics that advertise and perform later, much more expensive abortions, if we were conservative and treated every one of PPFA’s 305,310 abortions as a standard first-trimester suction abortion, at the going rate for such abortions in 2005, Planned Parenthood’s income from abortion in 2007 would have been at least $126 million. This alone would represent more than a third of PPFA’s clinic income for the fiscal year.

Bundled services attached to those abortions add to those revenues. And every later abortion PPFA clinics perform means hundreds of dollars more in its coffers. That explains why Planned Parenthood fights so hard for this “insignificant” part of their business.

Funding the Abortion Agenda

PPFA took in over $1 billion in revenues from all sources in the fiscal year running July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008. Over a third, nearly $350 million, came in the form of “Government Grants and Contracts”—your tax dollars and mine.

Private donors were responsible for nearly a quarter with “Contributions and Bequests” totaling $244.9 million. “Health Center Income” was the biggest source of revenue (see above) with “Other” bringing in an additional $68.9 million.

Planned Parenthood not only takes in a great deal of money from abortion, it also spends a great deal of money, time, and energy perfecting, promoting, and defending it.

Under the heading of “Excellence in Medical Standards and Training,” PPFA touts its research project on “medication abortion service delivery.” Nothing beyond a vague statement that this was part of “an effort to continuously improve health care services” explains why this was needed.

But informed pro-lifers know that at least two Planned Parenthood “medication abortion” patients died after using the drugs in ways that had not been sanctioned by the U.S. government agency that approved the RU486 method. Then again, it could be simply a part of the large-scale expansion of chemical abortion that has taken place at PPFA over the past several years.

Internationally, Planned Parenthood says that it helped nearly 15,000 women obtain “safe abortion or post-abortion care.” Without offering detail about the nature of the services involved, the report tells of an “innovative” program in a remote area of in the Peruvian rainforest linking “environmental conservation and reproductive health” for 6,000 fishermen and farmers.

PPFA notes that, “[t]hanks in large part to Planned Parenthood’s advocacy,” the 110th Congress approved the “largest one-year dollar increase ever to international family planning.” It also celebrated President Obama’s overturning of the “global gag rule,” which had prohibited groups receiving U.S. “family planning” money from performing or promoting abortion overseas.

Planned Parenthood proudly notes that it defeated measures in seven states—Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Wisconsin, and West Virginia—designed to copy the “federal abortion ban” [of partial-birth abortion]. In Michigan and Arizona, Planned Parenthood relates that, though these measures were passed by the state legislatures, PPFA worked with governors to secure vetoes. Planned Parenthood also fought a Right to Know law in South Dakota, limits on RU486 in Ohio and New Mexico, and a law in Missouri that PPFA says would have forced an affiliate of theirs to stop doing abortions.

Planned Parenthood laments that the organization “had to spend vital resources fighting a campaign that targeted us directly,” referring to federal efforts to defund the abortion giant.

The current economic downturn may not end the string of record revenues and record numbers of abortions at Planned Parenthood. Money for “family planning” that was, after public outcry, cut from the stimulus package, was added back into the latest budget. If Planned Parenthood gets its wish and gets abortion covered in President Obama’s national health care plan, even more public money could be flowing to its coffers.

According to a story in U.S. News & World Report, since the economic down- turn, people have been “swarming” into Planned Parenthood’s clinics (2/24/09). Affiliates in Iowa, Illinois, and St. Louis are reporting substantial increases in the number of abortions (Omaha World Herald, 4/10/09; NPR, 3/20/09; Associated Press, 3/24/09).

With Obama in office and many friends up on Capitol Hill, Planned Parenthood is a formidable, well-funded foe. Those of us who defend life may not have the money, but we do have truth, compassion, and justice on our side, and, if we never give up, our cause will prevail.