Last week, Politifact made the claim that Planned Parenthood is not an abortion business, calling it an “exaggeration” to say otherwise. Yet, Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports and words prove the abortion corporation is in business to sell abortion.
The “fact check” by Politifact was in response to a LifeNews.com article from February 2019 which focused on Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to expand taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. The proposal didn’t make it through the state’s budget process, yet Politifact felt the need to comment more than a year after the fact, and in doing so, perpetuated the false narrative that Planned Parenthood is a health care provider.
Abortion Numbers
Planned Parenthood claims that abortion is only four percent of what it does, but this a sleight of hand. By unbundling services including birth control, pregnancy tests, urine testing, STI testing, and more — which are provided for every abortion patient — it appears as though abortion is just a piece of the picture when it is actually the entire picture. A pregnancy test will cost around $10, while an abortion can cost as much as $1500, showing that these services aren’t comparable when looking at the big picture of Planned Parenthood’s business.
In 2015, Rich Lowry wrote in the New York Post that Planned Parenthood’s insistence that abortion is so little of what it does is ludicrous. “Major League Baseball teams could say that they sell about 20 million hot dogs and play 2,430 games in a season,” he wrote, “so baseball is only .012 percent of what they do.”
Abortion Quotas
Planned Parenthood is so focused on abortion that it actually sets abortion quotas. “Every center had a goal for how many abortions were done, and centers that didn’t do abortions […] had a goal for the number of abortion referrals,” Sue Thayer, former Planned Parenthood manager, told Live Action president Lila Rose. “And it was on this big grid and if we hit our goal, our line was green, if we were five percent under it was yellow. If it was 10 percent under it was red. That’s when we needed to have a corrective action plan: Why we didn’t hit the goal, What we’re gonna do differently next time. So we were really very goal-oriented. I trained my staff the way I was trained which was to really encourage women to choose abortion, to have it at Planned Parenthood because that counts towards our goal. We would try to get the appointment scheduled for the abortion before they left our clinic.”
Thayer admitted they would use fear tactics to get the women to have an abortion. Planned Parenthood, she said, also had incentives for facilities to sell more abortions.
“I felt like I was more of a salesman sometimes, to sell abortions,” former Planned Parenthood nurse Marianne Anderson told Rose. “And we were told on a regular basis that you have a quota to meet to keep this clinic open.”
Increased Market Share
Despite an overall drop in abortions nationally, the number of abortions committed by Planned Parenthood continues to rise. Nationwide, abortions have dropped 50 percent since 1980, but Planned Parenthood committed a record number (345,672) of abortions in 2018-2019, and as a result, now does 40 percent of all of the abortions in the U.S., a massive stake of the market share.
Declining Health Care Services
As the number of abortions at Planned Parenthood climbs, the number of legitimate health care services falls. From 2008 to 2018, Planned Parenthood’s contraception services dropped by almost 33 percent. Over that same ten years, cancer screenings declined over 60 percent, Pap tests by 72 percent, and breast exams by nearly 68 percent.
Abortion is “Core Mission”
For years Planned Parenthood touted itself as a health care organization. When Dr. Leana Wen took over as president of the abortion corporation, she stated that the “core mission” of Planned Parenthood was “providing, protecting and expanding access to abortion….”
Despite this, Wen was fired within months of joining Planned Parenthood, and according to her own words, she was fired because she “did not prioritize abortion enough.”
Abortion Only
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some Planned Parenthood locations stopped offering all services — except abortion. Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, as well as locations in Illinois, decided to prioritize abortion over what little health care services they did offer, during a global health crisis.
“[S]o much for ‘abortions aren’t all we do,'” Dr. Monique Ruberu wrote in response to Planned Parenthood’s decision to solely commit abortions in Southeastern Pennsylvania, which is in close proximity to the COVID-19 epicenter of New York City. When the governor called for only lifesaving businesses to remain open amid the pandemic, Planned Parenthood decided to offer nothing besides abortion. Deliberately killing preborn human beings is never medically necessary.
Planned Parenthood’s 2018-2019 annual report showed that it brought in $110 million in excess revenue, sending its net assets for 2018 soaring to nearly $2 billion. The truth is that over half of Planned Parenthood’s non-government health services revenue comes from abortion, which makes abortion the top priority and the top moneymaker for the corporation.
Perhaps the next time Politifact decides to “fact check” a claim about about Planned Parenthood, it should take into account the above facts, which were gleaned from the corporation itself.
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