Abortion, Government Funding for Planned Parenthood at an All-Time High

Planned Parenthood released its latest annual report the day after Mother’s Day. For 2023-2024, abortions are at an all-time high. So is government funding.

Nearly three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and many states enacted strong pro-life protections, business is still booming. Congress and President Donald Trump can take action—but will they?

Here are the key takeaways you need to know.

In the medical data section, Planned Parenthood reported:

• 402,230 abortions, an all-time high, and up from last year’s 392,715 abortions.
• 367,594 breast cancer screenings and Pap tests, down from 410,272 the previous year.
• 129,594 preventive care visits, roughly the same as last year’s 129,216
• 2,148 adoption referrals, up from 1,721 the previous year but half the referrals made just five years ago.
• 2,223,680 contraceptive services, down from 2,250,913 the previous year.
• 2.08 million patients, slightly up from last year’s 2.05 million, but quite a drop-off from the 2.4 million reported five years ago.

For every adoption referral made last year, Planned Parenthood performed 187 abortions.

Planned Parenthood highlights a new telehealth platform it is using in 42 states and Washington, D.C. for many services—including providing abortion pills to women who have never seen a doctor in-person to be screened for complications.

For the second year in a row, Planned Parenthood also touted how it helps women from pro-life states travel elsewhere to get abortions. The abortion giant reports assisting more than 100,000 women seeking abortions in the past year. More than 12,500 women received on average $275 to go toward travel costs. That’s more than $3.4 million in direct funding for abortion travel.

What about gender services such as cross-sex hormones? More than 430 clinics offer it. Out of 49 affiliates, 23 offer telehealth for gender services. Unlike other types of categories in the report, Planned Parenthood has never specified how many gender services it provides. That information is buried in an “other” category that includes several kinds of services.

The first year Planned Parenthood mentioned gender in the “other category” a decade ago, there were 8,153 services reported. This year there were 77,858. Different accounting mechanisms may be the source of the dramatically different numbers we saw in 2021 and 2022, but there’s no way to know for sure based on this report alone.

Here’s what we do know. Planned Parenthood is, by its own admission, “the second-largest provider of hormone therapy” in the nation. Thanks to other publicly available reporting we can reasonably infer that gender services in particular have caused a spike in this category.

A recent Manhattan Institute investigation found that in 2023 alone nearly 40,000 people went to Planned Parenthood for cross-sex hormones—about 40% of them between the ages of 18-22.

In the financial data section, Planned Parenthood reported:

• $2.522 billion in net assets, up from $2.517 billion the previous year.
• $792.2 million in government funding, up from $699.3 the previous year.
• More than $2 billion in total revenue, almost equal to the previous year.
• $27.4 million in excess revenue (calculated by subtracting total expenses from total revenues, down from 178.6 million the previous year).
• $684.1 million in private contributions and bequests, down from $997.5 million reported the previous year.

There’s no denying that as far as abortion and gender services are concerned, business is booming at Planned Parenthood. This is despite the wave of pro-life laws enacted in roughly half the states in 2022. Dangerous abortion pills—specifically the Obama and Biden administrations’ reckless disregard of long-standing safety protocols—are largely to blame. It’s easier than ever to access abortion pills online and through the mail, without ever seeing a doctor in-person, despite the well-documented health risks.

It’s no coincidence that Planned Parenthood jumped into the gender drugs game right around the time the Obama administration started loosening safety regulations for abortion drugs. As fewer women needed surgical abortions and opted for pills instead, Planned Parenthood shifted gears and expanded its offerings.

Fewer (expensive) surgical abortions and more (less expensive) pill-induced abortions cutting into profits? No problem when there’s new gender services getting new people into the door, too.

Pro-life states will have to continue fighting for life. But there’s more that federal policymakers can do, too. The reconciliation bill making its way through Congress currently includes a provision to defund Planned Parenthood of Medicaid funding, its prime source of government money.

Trump can reinstate a regulation regarding the Title X Family Planning Program, which requires grantees to physically and financially separate Title X activity from abortion activity, and not refer Title X clients for abortions. When this policy was in place during Trump’s first term, Planned Parenthood refused to comply and walked away from more than $60 million. Self-defunding, if you will.

Planned Parenthood should not receive a dime of taxpayer funding—clinics that offer real health care should. In fact, new analysis shows that community health centers outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics 15:1.

A pro-life Congress and a pro-life administration have a chance to strike a blow for real women’s health care. Will they deliver?

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