Falsely portraying itself as a “healthcare organization” for decades has enabled Planned Parenthood to receive billions in taxpayer dollars, diverting money that could be allocated to real health care groups.
In part two of Live Action News’ “REJECT Planned Parenthood” series, we expose Planned Parenthood’s insidious agenda to receive billions in taxpayer dollars under the guise of “family planning.”
Planned Parenthood’s ‘blueprint’ to obtain tax dollars
In 1966, former Planned Parenthood president Alan F. Guttmacher (a former VP for the American Eugenics Society and founder of the Guttmacher Institute) proposed a blueprint to force taxpayers to pay for birth control access for the poor.
Elected to Planned Parenthood’s national board in 1962, Guttmacher believed (as did many eugenicists) that population control was an absolute necessity. While publicly, the messaging given to the media was one of empowering others to make “choices,” Guttmacher once admitted to the New York Times, “The main goal of our program is not just to limit population, but to give everyone the same opportunity for quality medical care.” Guttmacher acknowledged population control as one of his intended goals, but clothed it in the same type of messaging used by modern-day Planned Parenthood: the language of access or “opportunity” to receive “health care” or “medical care.”
Within a few short years, Guttmacher’s “blueprint” became a reality and Planned Parenthood’s coffers quickly filled.
NYT – Birth Control Group Offers Plan For Free Services to Millions, 2/10/1966
Planned Parenthood initiates push for federal dollars
In 1970, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 298 to 32 to approve the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, Title X of the Public Health Service Act, authorizing federal dollars to pay for family planning services for low-income women. As Live Action News has previously documented, one of the chief co-sponsors of the Title X statute was Rep. George H.W. Bush (R-TX), who later became our nation’s 41st president.
The program, which to this day allocates millions of federal tax dollars to Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations, was justifiably viewed as suspicious for targeting “low-income,” impoverished Americans.
Read Live Action News’ series on the history of Title X (parts one, two, three, and four), as well as Planned Parenthood’s Blueprint.
George HW Bush elected to Congress 1966 with wife Barbara (Image credit: Credit: George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
According to Planned Parenthood insider Jeannie Isabelle Rosoff, the push for federal population control dollars by then-Congressman Bush was actually initiated by Planned Parenthood and its “special affiliate,” the Guttmacher Institute.
In the book, “A Tradition of Choice,” Planned Parenthood describes Rosoff as the lobbyist (alongside director Frederick S. Jaffe) of the “first Washington office of PPFA [Planned Parenthood Federation of America].” That office was called the Center for Family Planning Program Development, which later became the Guttmacher Institute.
According to the Lancet, Rosoff served two decades “as President and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute” after being recruited by PPFA and hired by Jaffe. She had first-hand knowledge of the behind-the-scenes dealings regarding the passage of the Title X program. In an interview she conducted in 2001 with Rebecca Sharpless, published by Baylor University Institute for Oral History, Rosoff described the affiliate’s move to the nation’s capital as being motivated by the infusion of tax funding:
Ostensibly, therefore, the reason for Planned Parenthood‘s opening an office in Washington was that federal grants were going to be made out of Washington and therefore one should be there to kind of seize the opportunity and guide the direction of this new national program… the whole imperative there is not to refinance Planned Parenthood services but to expand services nationwide…
This is where AGI [Alan Guttmacher Institute] began, really, because to do that, you would really have to go proselytize at the local level… So Fred Jaffe went to the Ford Foundation and got a large grant essentially for the Washington office to create a technical assistance program….
In her interview, Rosoff seemed to indicate that the plan rested on her ability to choose the right person to sponsor the legislation, discussing how she was pointed “toward George Bush” who was at that time “serving on the Ways and Means committee as a new congressman from Houston.”
By all indications, Congressman George H.W. Bush may have also been targeted by Rosoff for another reason: his grandfather, Prescott Bush, once sat on the board of Planned Parenthood.
Unfortunately, instead of rejecting Planned Parenthood tax funding, the dollars continued to roll in.
Taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood skyrocket as abortions increase
In 1950, media reports claimed Planned Parenthood’s budget was $168,000. By 1969, proposals to commit millions in federal funds for “family planning” were being discussed in the U.S., and in 1970, when the Title X Family Planning Program was birthed, the New York Times reported an $8 million dollar budget for Planned Parenthood.
However just one year later, in 1971, when “so many men” were “now deep in the movement” — outnumbering women “55 to 49,” on the national board of Planned Parenthood, according to the New York Times — Planned Parenthood’s budget “for this year was $20 million — 20 times what it was… in 1959.”
By 1978, Planned Parenthood had elected its very first Black female as president, Faye Wattleton, who told the media that she was “putting the world on notice,” and that the organization was going to be much more aggressive on ‘abortion rights’. Wattleton vowed to restore abortion access “to the poor” under Medicaid. Under Wattleton’s leadership, Planned Parenthood’s budget grew from $90 million (1978) to $384 million (1990).
In recent years (between 2022 and 2024), instead of rejecting Planned Parenthood’s appetite for taxpayer dollars, the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) allocated nearly $60 million to Planned Parenthood. Monies allocated are different from dollars sent to a Title X recipient during a specific year, and they break down as follows:
- In 2022, OPA awarded funding to 89 Title X grant recipients, directly allocating over $16.8 million to 13 Planned Parenthood recipients. Planned Parenthood made up 15% of Title X recipients.
- In 2023, OPA awarded funding to 86 Title X grant recipients, directly allocating nearly $20.8 million to 13 Planned Parenthood recipients. Planned Parenthood made up nearly 16% of Title X recipients.
- In 2024, OPA awarded funding to 86 Title X grant recipients, directly allocating nearly $20.6 million to 13 Planned Parenthood recipients. Planned Parenthood again made up nearly 16% of Title X recipients.
The recipients include Planned Parenthood affiliates, which means that these federal dollars are being funneled to multiple Planned Parenthood centers under each affiliate’s control.
Due in part to taxpayer funding under Title X as well as Medicaid, Planned Parenthood’s total balance sheet (ending on June 30, 2023) shows that the organization’s net assets and liabilities have risen to over $2.9 billion — the highest recorded in recent years. And in the latest year recorded, taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood reached an all time high of nearly $700 million.
Abortions skyrocket as taxpayer dollars flow to Planned Parenthood
An examination of Planned Parenthood’s annual reports for 1995 to 2014 — years when HHS did not require Title X projects to be physically and financially separate from abortion — reveals how integral abortion is to Planned Parenthood, reported the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI).
“While abortions performed at non-Planned Parenthood centers decreased by more than 50% during those years, Planned Parenthood abortions increased 142%, growing Planned Parenthood’s market share of abortions from 10% in 1995 to 35% in 2014,” CLI reported in 2024.
But an examination of data prior to 1990 reveals that abortions at Planned Parenthood have increased nearly 300% since 1988.
In addition, Planned Parenthood’s national abortion market share has skyrocketed by 700% from 1989, when abortions at Planned Parenthood made up just 5% of the national market share of abortions. Today, Planned Parenthood holds 40% of the U.S. abortion market share; 70% of the abortions it commits are done by abortion pill (nearly 275,000 sales estimated yearly).
Federal Title X dollars, as well as those allocated through Medicaid and other agencies, may have actually played a role in their increased abortions.
READ: 6 key facts about the revealing New York Times exposé on Planned Parenthood’s ‘crisis’
In 1984, media outlets recorded that Planned Parenthood affiliates had received $30 million in family planning funds. By 1989, “The Federal family planning aid amounted to $34.8 million” when “Planned Parenthood’s budget was $321 million,” the New York Times (NYT) reported in 1990.
In 1988, “Only 50 of its [Planned Parenthood’s] 178 affiliates perform[ed] abortions” and accounted “for 104,000 of the 1.6 million abortions in the United States in 1988,” the New York Times reported. By 1989, “Planned Parenthood clinics performed 122,000 [abortions], about 7.6 percent of the estimated 1.6 [million] abortions in the country, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. The figure was 5 percent in the mid-1980’s,” according to the NYT.
In its most recent annual report for 2022-23, Planned Parenthood boasted a “year of moving mountains,” with abortions climbing to a record high (392,715 abortions), while clients decreased overall — and taxpayer funding hit nearly $700 million. In the past quarter of a century, taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood has increased by 245%.
Since 1988, nearly 20 years after taxpayer-funded family planning dollars flooded Planned Parenthood’s coffers under the Title X program, abortions at the corporation have swelled nearly 300% (277.61%), rising from 104,000 abortions committed by Planned Parenthood in 1988 to 392,715 recorded in the organization’s 2022-23 annual report. And in just the past 25 years, abortions at Planned Parenthood increased nearly 100%, from 197,070 (2000-01) to 392,715 (2022-23).
Ironically, while taxpayers foot the bill for millions in family planning services to Planned Parenthood, their own reports show that between 2012-2013 and 2022-2023, contraceptive services decreased nearly 40%, from 3.7 million to 2.2 million, falling 44% since 2009.
Planned Parenthood: Increased abortions and decreased services
Since 2000, Planned Parenthood has committed over 7.1 million abortions while receiving nearly $10.7 billion from taxpayers, all while actual health care services have plummeted. Yet instead of rejecting Planned Parenthood as a recipient of taxpayer funding, taxpayer dollars and abortions continue to skyrocket at Planned Parenthood.
That funding could have been funneled to Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) over the years, which do not commit abortions, and, as of 2023, have increased health care services and clients to a point where they outnumber Planned Parenthood centers 25 to 1.
In 2023, FQHCs:
- Served over 15 times as many men and women and nearly 10 times as many women as Planned Parenthood in 2023.
- Served nearly 93 times as many prenatal care patients as Planned Parenthood in 2023.
- Tested nearly 4.3 million females for cervical cancer, carried out nearly 1.9 million pap tests – nearly 10 times what Planned Parenthood committed (197,617) in 2022-23, and tested over 1.6 million women with mammograms in 2023, because Planned Parenthood does not offer mammograms.
Today, taxpayers are growing acutely aware of the ruse that Planned Parenthood is a so-called “healthcare” organization and many are beginning to reject Planned Parenthood, recognizing that the organization’s number one focus is abortion.
