Normally by this time of the year, you'd expect to have read in this space the latest details contained in Planned Parenthood's latest Annual Report. But for some reason it isn't out yet. A factsheet recently appearing on the organization's website is silent about the group's lucrative finances, but does tell us that the group has once again performed a record number of abortions at its clinics.
According to the factsheet, available at clinics affiliated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) performed 324,008 abortions in 2008.
This represents a one year increase of more than 6% over the 305,310 abortions the organization did in 2007. (www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/fact_ppservices_2010-09-03.pdf)
Though we don't have a reliable national count yet for 2008, considered as a percentage of the latest national annual abortion figure the Guttmacher Institute reported for 2005, this would make Planned Parenthood responsible for 26.8% of all abortions performed in the U.S. This easily cements their place as America's top abortion chain.
In the factsheet, Planned Parenthood continues to downplay the significance of abortion to their business. It again trots out the wholly-misleading claim that abortion represents only 3% of its services. The report shows, however, that most of these other "services" are much more routine, much less profitable tests and procedures, such as pregnancy, pap, and HIV tests, vaccinations, and giving out pill packets.
But if women who aborted at Planned Parenthood in 2008 paid what was the going price for abortions in 2005, those 324,008 abortions would represent more than $133 million in income, more than a third of what Planned Parenthood says it took in at its clinics in its most recent Annual Report. And this assumes that all those abortions were standard first-trimester suction curettage abortions, when we know that there are Planned Parenthood clinics which advertise and perform more expensive chemical and later-term abortions.
We don't have the latest financial figures from Planned Parenthood in this latest factsheet, but it is obvious nonetheless that, whatever Planned Parenthood may say about abortion's relative percentage of the services the group provides, abortion significantly impacts the organization's bottom line.
There are a few other figures from the Planned Parenthood factsheet worth noting. Planned Parenthood says it has more than 825 clinics and more than 30,000 staff members and volunteers. PPFA claims it has more than four million activists, supporters, and donors on its notification list.
After a series of recent mergers and disaffiliations, the group now has 87 affiliates. The group is said to have had more than double that number in 1979 (see NRL News, March 2008). Many of the larger, more profitable affiliates have gobbled up the smaller ones as the organization becomes leaner and quite literally, as the record number of abortions shows, meaner.
Perhaps most disturbing is the claim from the factsheet that "Seventy-two percent of our clients have incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal policy level." With its recent efforts to build new, upscale megaclinics, Planned Parenthood has reached out to a wealthier clientele, yet Planned Parenthood's customers are still, apparently, drawn predominantly from the less affluent classes.
Planned Parenthood likes to cast itself as a defender of the impoverished, but consider the following. Abortion on demand has done nothing to improve the lot of America's poor, but someone has sure made a lot of money off their misery in the last thirty-seven years.
Contact: Randall K O'Bannon, Ph.D.
Date Published: September 13, 2010
