Opinion

Planned Parenthood’s annual report shows abortion pays

Drew Belsky Communications Director, Live Action
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Just in time for the holidays – when more Americans than usual are ignoring the news – Planned Parenthood (PP) released its annual report for 2012. The document is a mishmash of evasion, triumphalism, and strategic omissions.

Starting out, the report is curiously more open about abortion than PP usually is. The same organization that tried to abandon “pro-choice” and downplay the procedure’s financial importance is now touting its advocacy “for policies that provide access to safe and legal abortion[.]”  This could signal yet another pivot in the corporation’s advertising strategy – like the more zealous “choice” activists of late, the executives in PP’s PR department might be ready to try making abortion cool.

If this is the mentality in the Planned Parenthood boardroom, it may have been spurred by 2012’s abortion numbers. Per the report, the abortion giant ended 327,166 pre-born lives in 2012, down from 333,964 in 2011.

Other numbers declined more steeply. Adoption referrals, already dismally low, are down 4.5 percent – for every adoption referral PP completed in 2012, the abortion giant terminated the lives of 149 pre-born children. Prenatal services on the whole, meanwhile, dropped by 32 percent in 2012; they have dropped 52 percent since 2009. Furthermore, cancer screening and preventive services fell by 14 percent, adding to a years-long downward trend (39 percent since 2009).

(It must be noted that, at the very least, PP’s mammogram number remains steady. It was zero in 2012, neither up nor down from zero in 2011. This is a hefty infinity percent less than PP’s claims on the matter.)

So we see a tiny decline in abortions compared to significant drops in other services. One can’t be blamed for suspecting that PP is jettisoning less lucrative women’s health services to focus on abortion, the corporation’s true money-maker (along with contraception, which, when it fails, opens up the door for more abortion income). In light of PP’s January 2013 mandate that every affiliate include at least one surgical abortion facility, one can’t be blamed for moving from suspicion to certainty.

Two more numbers must be mentioned: 3 percent and $540.6 million. The first represents PP’s claim as to how much of its services comprise abortion, and the second specifies the amount of money forcibly excised from taxpayers for PP’s benefit in 2012.

Regarding 3 percent, the number has been exposed as a ludicrous lie many times. Suffice it to say that at a conservative estimate of $520 on average per abortion, PP raked in over $170 million, or 55 percent of its non-taxpayer-funded “clinic” (i.e., abortion facility) income.

Regarding $540.6 million, abortion advocates will contend that federal money can’t be used for abortions. This is not true, especially with Obamacare ascending. However, even if one grants the premise, all that means is that taxpayers – many of them stridently opposed to abortion as an egregious evil – are forced by government to pay PP’s electric bill (more accurately, 45 percent of its budget) so the organization can destroy pre-born babies with “its own” money.

Perhaps to distract from these numbers and their disquieting implications, PP included in this year’s report a slick fill-up-space endeavor called “10 History-Making Moments.” Besides fluff like “A Global Reach” (number 4) and “Reaching Youth Online” (number 10), the abortion corporation predictably gushes over Wendy Davis, now a gubernatorial candidate laboring to paper over her objectively fringe pro-late-term-abortion stance.

Notably unmentioned in PP’s history-making moments:

– The “meat-market, assembly-line abortions” at Planned Parenthood Delaware, where conditions were so health-hazardous that two self-proclaimed pro-choice nurses not only quit in disgust, but testified against them in state legislative hearings. A former health care manager at the same facility later joined them.

– A PP representative testifying to the Florida State Legislature that what happens to a born-alive infant after a failed abortion attempt – “struggling on the table,” as one legislator put it – “should be between the patient and the health care provider.”

– The Kermit Gosnell case, in which the state of Pennsylvania allowed an abortionist to destroy viable pre-born and born babies for over a decade. When Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder, plus hundreds of other offenses, PP bent over backwards to avoid even mentioning Gosnell’s infant victims.

– The third in a series of banner years for pro-life legislation, including in North Dakota, Arkansas, and Texas (this last curiously absent in PP’s Wendy Davis pow-wow). A 20-week federal ban is also up for consideration in the Senate.

In sum, Planned Parenthood was savvy to quietly nudge out its annual report amid the bustle of the holiday season. Behind the glitz, one sees a panicking organization, dumping all its preventative-services and cancer-screening ballast in favor of abortion, abortifacients, and abortion-encouraging contraception at all costs – even to the point of embracing the gruesome and unpopular procedure as an objective good.