Planned Parenthood has just released its annual report for the 2018–2019 fiscal year, and the numbers don’t come as much of a surprise. In 2018, Planned Parenthood facilities performed 345,672 abortions, an increase of more than 13,000 abortions from what the group reported for the previous fiscal year. That’s also the highest number of abortions that the group has ever performed in a single year since it began reporting its abortion data.
This statistic reveals that, as the abortion rate in the United States has declined steadily over the last several decades, Planned Parenthood’s share of the annual abortions in the nation has continued to increase.
Late last year, the Centers for Disease Control released its data for 2016, showing about 623,000 abortions for the year and reporting that the abortion rate had dropped yet again. According to CDC statistics, the U.S. abortion rate has fallen by about 50 percent since 1980. The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, meanwhile, estimates that there were about 862,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2017, accounting for the fact that not all states report their abortion data to the CDC.
Based on the CDC statistics, then, Planned Parenthood clinics perform more than half of the total reported abortions in the U.S. and, based on Guttmacher’s reporting, well over one-third of the estimated annual abortions each year. Planned Parenthood executives ritually insist that abortion is just 3 percent of group’s “services” — a carefully manufactured statistic that has been deemed inaccurate and misleading by left-leaning outlets such as Slate and the Washington Post — even as the group performs somewhere between one-third and half the total abortions in the U.S. every year.
Contrast Planned Parenthood’s 345,672 abortions in 2018 with the other actual services the group’s facilities offered. According to the report, the group offered 9,798 prenatal-care services and made 4,279 adoption referrals, which means that its facilities performed 35 abortions for every instance of prenatal care and 81 abortions for every adoption referral.
At the same time, the group obtained the largest share of its revenue from government reimbursements and grants, despite having spent the entirety of Trump’s presidency fundraising off of fear mongering about how Republicans intended to block women from receiving “reproductive health care.”
Based on Planned Parenthood’s own reporting alone, its federal funding should be stripped and redirected to health-care organizations that actually serve women, rather than a group that profits from ending an increasing number of innocent human lives while the U.S. abortion rate continues to fall.