Let's Talk About Planned Parenthood

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By Aidan Mattis

I’ll come right out and say it – I’m biased. I have nothing but disdain for Planned Parenthood, those who run it, and those who founded it. The organization championed as the most available and affordable women’s health clinic in the country is nothing but a scam, and I intend to explain exactly why that is in detail. This is not propaganda, this is not some shady attempt at being pro-life because, honestly, what you do with your pregnancy is your decision. This is not about abortion, at least not entirely. This is about the fact that Planned Parenthood makes its money off of shady lies, deception, and coercion. This is about the fact that Planned Parenthood was founded as and still operates as a Eugenics Clinic. To start, we’re just going to tell you how much profit PP made in their last available annual report.

The nonprofit, supposedly for the betterment of society organization cleared just under $60 million in 2015 (PP Annual Report 2014-15). That’s obscene, and they do it every year. That is how much they have left over after all their expenses, and do you think they give it back to the government? They don’t. It get’s worse from here. In the hearing prior to the congress voting to defund Planned Parenthood, or at the very least cut funding from the organization which receives nearly $530 million taxpayer dollars each year, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) claimed “Planned Parenthood has annual revenues of $127 million more than their expenses. They were sending money overseas, they were spending money and giving it political organizations, they have a lot of shared services—I think these are legitimate questions as we look at the finances of an organization that is structured as a non-profit,” (Live News). Tellingly, nobody in the room, including executives of Planned Parenthood, disputed this number.

So aside from an organization that clears anywhere between $60-130 million each year, what else is wrong with Planned Parenthood? Let’s start at the beginning, with the founder of PP. Margaret Sanger, an outspoken feminist and “Women’s Rights Activist”, had a vision. A world where women could get abortions free of charge, free of judgement, and free of the influence of their insurance company or just about anyone else. The problem? She was a racist. The goal of her little nonprofit was actually to kill black, immigrant, and poor children and sterilize such individuals as adults in order to “purify” the American population. You think I’m joking? Here’s some of her own words. In reference to immigrants and the poor in her book, The Pivot of Civilization, she calls the aforementioned “…human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning…human beings who never should have been born,”. She believed that the purpose of birth control was “to create a race of thoroughbreds”, by assuring there were “More children from the fit, less from the unfit”, that this was “the chief aim of birth control.” (Birth Control Review Nov. 1921, Nov. 1919). Quite possibly the most disturbing not only because of the implications but also the way she refers to African Americans as somehow subhuman is found in a personal letter she wrote to a colleague, where she says “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” The woman literally feared rebellion by African Americans if they found out she was trying to get rid of them. Golly gee, Batman, can’t imagine why that might be!

Sanger’s many transgressions and blatant racist, and generally prejudiced attitude towards anyone who wasn’t white. As well, she hated anyone not middle or upper class, and she held a disdain for the Catholic Church, for obvious reasons. All told, Margaret Sanger was a eugenics supporter and openly wished to see a world very similar to that of Adolf Hitler. If you still don’t believe me, go look here.

Now onto PP and their lies. If you’ve been anywhere near a television while Planned Parenthood is being discussed, you’ll hear their organization and people all over the Democratic Party singing their praises about how they provide Birth Control, Prenatal Care, Mammograms, Abortions, and Family Planning. So what’s the issue? Well, Live Action did a little experiment where they called dozens of Planned Parenthood clinics asking for Prenatal Care. This was the result:

So did someone forget to tell their clinics that they do prenatal care? Nope. Actually, only 7.8% of PP clinics offer Prenatal Care while 40% provide abortions. That’s just prenatal care, though, right? To quote our new President:

“Wrong.”

Planned Parenthood claims that should they be defunded, women everywhere will lose access to Mammograms, a vital and life saving procedure for women. Ignoring the fact that PP only had 2.7 million clients last year, but performed well over 10 million “services” (services are anything from a full on abortion to a free condom being dispensed, but we’ll get to that in moment), this whole mammogram deal is a mammoscam. To the Youtube, once again.

ARE YOU SHOCKED?!?!?!?

I’m not.

Planned Parenthood is in the business not only of eugenics and abortions and (allegedly) selling little teensy weensy fetus parts for the big bucks, but they actually lie about the good things they supposedly do. When they aren’t blatantly lying under oath, to the American people, and to their clients, they’re using statistics in a disgustingly misleading manner. Planned Parenthood says that Abortion procedures make up 3% of services they perform. While that is technically true, the truth lies in how they define a “service”. PP performed around 330,000 abortions in 2016, and around 9.5 million services total. So, abortions were 3% by that standard. But lets take a look at what a service is, shall we? According to Planned Parenthood’s 2014-15 Annual Report, they did quite a bit more than abortion. But, their total number of clients that year is what actually matters. A client is anyone who received any one or more services from PP, which means that the actual percentage of women who got an abortion through Planned Parenthood is not 330,000 out of 9,455,00 but 330,000 out of 2,700,000, or 12%. That’s 1 in 8 clients getting an abortion. This means more than just what’s on the surface, however, because it means those 330,000 women also came in for other services prior to their abortion. Let that sink in: one out of every eight women who enters a Planned Parenthood clinic is getting an abortion, but almost none of them are getting access to prenatal care or mammograms as advertised.

Let’s talk about Planned Parenthood’s expenses, which are in the hundreds of millions. Each abortion is coupled with an ultrasound. Let’s lump those costs together for the sake of typing less words, shall we? An abortion, at it’s cheapest, costs $350, so we’ll use that figure. An ultrasound costs on average $200 out of pocket for just the imaging, no pictures (PP refuses to show women the pictures, because it might discourage them from getting an abortion (Life Site News)). So altogether a PP abortion costs $550. We’ll multiply that by how many they perform, so 550 multiplied by 330,000 is $181,500,000 spent on abortion out of a total budget of $1,296,100,000. PP only spends $1,237,300,000 of that, so that means that 14% of PP funding goes to abortions, if we’re being conservative. 43% of PP’s budget is government grants and reimbursements. As you can see, the statistics put out by Planned Parenthood are deliberately misleading given the number of clients and the amount spent on abortions alone. One in every seven dollars granted to planned parenthood is spent on abortions, and not a single dollar is spent on mammograms, and only three in five hundred women get prenatal care from Planned Parenthood. Then there’s this ridiculousness, with PP refusing to take a budget cut despite soaring surpluses.

If you thought blatant lies, racism, misleading the public, and profiting while being a nonprofit weren’t bad enough, it gets even worse. While trying to defend PP, Representative Luis Gutierrez (D – IL) startlingly admitted to Planned Parenthood’s history of sterilization. In his words, “My mother’s only option was the one option the government of the United States [via Planned Parenthood] gave her—which was sterilization. And for hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican women, that was the only option.” Jeepers, Scooby, the bad guys weren’t even wearing masks at this hearing. While unable to confirm it, I’ve also heard and read numerous accounts of minorities, immigrants, and today’s poor receiving encouragement to abort while white, middle and upper class expectant mothers receive counseling on adoption.

Hitler would be so proud.

Now of course, I’m not going to spout all this off and offer no alternative. Obviously a lot of people rely on Planned Parenthood for services other than abortions. For that solution, I look to someone who made a great point. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R – WI) stated that “By putting these dollars [which are currently supporting PP] in the federal community health centers, which provide the same kinds of services — for every Planned Parenthood, there are 20 federal community health centers. They’re vastly bigger in network, there are so many more of them, and they provide these kinds of services without all of the controversy surrounding this [abortion] issue.” Great point, Speaker. He’s right, as The Washington Post confirms in their fact checking article on the statement, provided here. While the Post attempts to spin him into being wrong in a series of convoluted mental gymnastics exercises, the fact is that he’s right. The only way the Post’s article makes any case against him is by saying that these centers provide less contraceptives than Planned Parenthood, but the thing about contraceptives is that they’re literally a dollar for a condom and $15 for a month’s supply of birth control pills. While I’m tempted to say that people should suck it up and pay for their own birth control methods, or to tell people that don’t have the money for it not to have sex if they can’t afford the risk (economics applies everywhere, truly a beautiful thing), I understand that humans are stubborn and will refuse at length to accept any responsibility for their reckless actions in this day and age as discussed here. So, if we take the over $500 million dollars that are sent to Planned Parenthood and supply them to federally approved public and rural health clinics instead, I’m sure those clinics can afford to stock their condom shelves a bit more thoroughly.

As for abortion alternatives, I hate the concept of abortion. If I could make everyone agree, I would. I think it’s a vile thing to do, I think it’s wrong, but I understand that other’s disagree and their voices deserve to be heard. So how do you make alternatives available? Simply put, market solutions rather than government solutions. If you remove Planned Parenthood, which provides 30% of the nation’s abortions, then a vacuum will open in the market. Insurance companies may start to offer abortion coverage, so might Medicaid. If you somehow slip through every crack, well the truth is that life isn’t fair and not everything works perfectly. That’s unlikely, however, given that the coming market deregulation is almost certain to lead to lower insurance costs for everyone and Medicaid will have a lighter burden, thus allowing them to cover the people that really need it most.

Now, Planned Parenthood wouldn’t fade out of existence, either. This past year, over 80,000 (and counting) private citizens donated to Planned Parenthood in amounts ranging from $5 to hundreds of dollars to screw with Vice President Mike Pence. A quarter pledged to be monthly supporters. That aside, a total of over 315,000 people have donated since Trump’s election (NY Mag). Multiple very wealthy celebrities have been singing PP’s praises lately. It is almost certain, then, the Planned Parenthood can survive on its own following defunding. Capitalism is a wonderful invention of man.

In conclusion, I am not making the case against abortion. That is a moral dilemma for another day and another post. This is an argument against Planned Parenthood. No institution that so egregiously lies to the people, to the government, to its private donors, and to its own clients should be given half a billion dollars each year to continue operating.