By Chris Gast, Education Coordinator, Right to Life of Michigan
Planned Parenthood is essentially the leader of the pro-abortion movement. There are a lot of billionaires, nonprofits, foundations, and others on the abortion team, but if you had to pick just one as the captain, it would be Planned Parenthood. So, it’s very important we see what they are doing, and where they are headed next to cause chaos.
Planned Parenthood recently released its latest annual report, covering 2021-2022. So, what stands out as a big change?
- Women make their triumphant return! In recent annual reports, Planned Parenthood almost entirely deleted any references to “women,” which was jarring given their public relations strategy of being the voice for women’s choice. After the Dobbs decision, “women” are back in.
- Planned Parenthood now has fewer than 600 centers across America, down from more than 900 in the 1990s.
- Client numbers continue declining, down 30,000 from the previous year.
- Despite this large decline in clients, they somehow provided 350,000 more “services.” Planned Parenthood in the past has inflated their number of “services” to claim that abortion is such a tiny part of their work. Each individual abortion visit can generate three or more “services,” according to their reporting.
- The number of abortions they committed was down slightly from 2020, during the brunt of the pandemic. They committed 374,155 abortions, down from 383,460.
- They provided 300,000 more telehealth appointments. Some of that is undoubtedly due to COVID, but they continue to make providing abortion pills through the mail a greater focus.
- Their category of “other procedures” increased massively, from 15,902 to 256,550! They include several things in this category, but one of note is transgender services.
- Always more money! Their total assets increased by about $200 million, their profits increased from $133.7 million to $204.7 million, and they spent an additional $30 million on management and general expenses.
- To really get a good sense of where Planned Parenthood is heading, let’s look back 10 years and what has changed from their 2011-12 annual report. These are trends that are clear when you look at years of their annual reports together.
- Their revenue has increased massively, from $1.2 billion to $1.9 billion.
- Meanwhile, their client base has declined massively, from 3 million down to 2.13 million.
- Funding from federal and state taxpayers has increased from $542.4 million to $670.4 million. Despite being partially defunded by the Trump Administration for a short period, they were more than able to make up the difference with state tax funding and by pandemic relief funds.
- Birth control—which is why Planned Parenthood was founded and what they most want people to identify them with—is in serious decline. Their number of contraceptive clients fell to 1,650,350 from 2,006,691. When you consider that there about 65 million women of reproductive age in America, they serve only 2.5% of American women.
- The number of manual breast exams—not mammograms—they performed fell to 193,045 from 639,384. Twenty years ago, they used to perform 1 million of those exams annually.
- Last, but of greatest concern, the number of abortions committed increased from 333,964 to 374,155.
Despite their claims otherwise, healthcare isn’t their business model. They lost about 30% of their clients in the last decade, and still increased revenues by 60%.
Money always seems to be an object of great concern to Planned Parenthood. Even independent abortion businesses will sometimes compare Planned Parenthood to Walmart or other big box stores. Lots of pro-lifers look at these numbers and believe Planned Parenthood is primarily influenced by the money.
While that may be true to a great extent, in the end, Planned Parenthood has stayed true to the mission of their founder, Margaret Sanger. What is that mission? What is their real business model? Promoting population control. Fewer births; fewer people. If they can financially benefit while doing it, they think that’s great.
Despite fewer and fewer women entering their doors, Planned Parenthood remains the most visible leader of the movement for less human life.
Judging them by their true business model, they have been remarkably successful. The U.S. total fertility rate is at an all-time low, down to 1.6 children per woman in 2020, from 1.9 in 2010. Over the last decade, Planned Parenthood has taken the lives of 3,419,465 innocent babies, and collected $5.8 billion of your tax dollars to force you to be complicit in it.
Editor’s note. This appeared in the summer issue of Right to Life of Michigan News and is reposted with permission.