Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Planned Parenthood
“When a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man’s true good. If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of a new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away. The acceptance of life strengthens moral fibre and makes people capable of mutual help.” ― Caritas in veritate, Pope Bendict XVI
Recently, Planned Parenthood released their annual report. Among the dismal statistics included in the report is that Planned Parenthood committed a record number of abortions between 2022-2023—over 400,000 of them.
As unbelievable as it may seem, the abortion giant decided to release this report on Mother’s Day.
Although Planned Parenthood likes to boast that it is a leading healthcare provider for mothers, the reality is that Planned Parenthood does more to prevent motherhood than any other organization in the United States.
To add insult to injury, the report was titled “A Force for Hope.” Tragically, there is no hope for the 400,000 preborn children who were slaughtered by Planned Parenthood’s abortionists in a single year.
Defunding Bill Moves Forward
Unfortunately, at a time when U.S. government officials and social scientists are fretting about a potentially catastrophic drop in the birth rate in the United States, the U.S. government continues to fund Planned Parenthood, to the tune of nearly $800 million per year.
The good news is that this spigot of funding, some of which comes from your pocket, and the pocket of every other U.S. taxpayer, may soon be turning off.
This past Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives, in an extremely narrow vote, passed a budget reconciliation bill that includes language that would defund Planned Parenthood. The bill will now go to the U.S. Senate for approval.
Already the Trump administration has stopped tens of millions of dollars in funding for Planned Parenthood by preventing Title X dollars from going to organizations that perform abortions. However, pro-life leaders have been fighting for years to fully defund Planned Parenthood. Despite repeated promises from lawmakers and attempts to include defunding language in previous budget bills, this goal has remained elusive.
This time, however, pro-life leaders are cautiously optimistic that the budget bill may be passed with the defunding language intact.
Planned Parenthood sounds panicky in their public responses to the bill. So do the host of pro-abortion celebrities who published a statement in the New York Times urging Congress not to defund Planned Parenthood.
In the statement, the celebrities claim that they are “for freedom,” and that they are “for you and me—not the government—deciding what care we need and where we can go to get it.” What this deceiving language conveniently ignores is that the budget bill does nothing to prevent anyone from going to Planned Parenthood and accessing their services. What it does do is stop taxpayer dollars from paying for those services.
That’s a big difference.
One day, hopefully, Planned Parenthood will close its doors for good, and the United States will be an abortion-free nation. In the meantime, however, these celebrities have the “freedom to choose” to give their money to Planned Parenthood. What they shouldn’t have the ability to do is require every taxpayer, including you and me, to pay for something that is morally abhorrent, and which is destroying our nation from the inside out.
Abortions Up, Cancer Screenings Down
In an analysis of the annual report, the Charlotte Lozier Institute notes that the total number of abortions committed by Planned Parenthood has increased by 23% since
2013. In the meantime, the actual health care procedures that Planned Parenthood likes to tout in its publicity materials are down significantly.
According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, “total cancer screening and prevention services have dropped by 54%, including declines of 61% for breast exams and 54% for pap tests.”
The Institute also notes that for every one adoption referral performed by Planned Parenthood they committed 187 abortions.
And yet, with an annual revenue of over $2 billion, and while sitting on assets worth over $2.5 billion, the abortion giant continues to feed at the public trough.
In a letter to Congress, a group of conservative and pro-life leaders urged lawmakers to pass the budget bill (I was on an international mission when leaders were asked to endorse the letter.). “No entity engaged in the mass killing and chemical sterilization of American children should receive a single cent from the federal government,” the letter states. “Any member of Congress who refuses to support this defunding effort, especially those claiming to defend life and promote family, is complicit in the ongoing exploitation of both born and preborn children.”
The letter also notes that Planned Parenthood “maintains a dangerous monopoly on sexual education in public schools, promoting distorted messages about gender and sexuality designed to funnel our children into the organization’s highly lucrative abortion and hormone-treatment pipelines.”
Planned Parenthood’s Gender Madness
When people think of Planned Parenthood they mostly immediately think of abortion, and perhaps contraception. However, in recent years Planned Parenthood has also become one of the leading purveyors of so-called transgender “treatments.”
One of the dirty secrets of gender ideology is that drugs and surgeries related to so-called “gender transitions” are an extremely lucrative source of income. Once a person has begun to take cross-sex hormones they are likely to be on those drugs for the rest of their lives.
Planned Parenthood has always had a keen nose for finding out where the money is. Like many clinics that offer gender-related drugs and procedures, Planned Parenthood has displayed a reckless and disturbing lack of due diligence in investigating the possible causes of a person’s gender confusion, instead offering powerful, life-altering drugs after the briefest of conversations.
Recently, the pro-life organization Live Action released undercover recordings in which Planned Parenthood staff repeatedly offered cross-sex hormones to minors, as young as 16 years old, with no other evaluation needed than a brief phone call. In the recordings, Planned Parenthood staff assured the caller that they could choose to meet with a provider virtually and have access to these powerful drugs even as early as the same day.
Multiple facilities told an undercover reporter posing as a gender-confused minor that no therapy, mental health clearance, or prior documentation would be required in order to receive cross-sex hormones.
It is hard to overstate just how insane this is. As Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action explained, “These dangerous drugs can sterilize, stunt growth, and leave lifelong scars. This is not healthcare. It is child abuse, and it must be stopped.”
U.S. Bishops Call for Planned Parenthood Defunding
In a joint statement, Bishop Daniel E. Thomas, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Bishop Robert E. Barron, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, urged Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.
“Americans should not be forced to subsidize abortions and ‘gender transition’ services with their tax dollars,” the two bishops stated. “For decades, Planned Parenthood has received government money and offered low-income women one terrible option: to end the lives of their babies.”
The bishops decried the fact that Planned Parenthood has expanded their “destructive offerings” by “promoting gender ideology and providing puberty blockers and hormones to minors, turning them into lifelong patients in the process.”
The bishops urged Congress to support authentic health care for vulnerable women and children, instead of continuing to throw billions of dollars at the abortion giant.
“We encourage greater support for authentic, life-affirming health care providers that serve mothers and their children in need,” they said. “We urge all members of Congress and the Administration to work in good faith to protect vulnerable women and children from mutilating ‘gender transition’ services and the scourge of abortion.”
There is no shortage of such life-affirming healthcare providers, many of which are desperately in need of some of the government largesse that is currently showered on Planned Parenthood.
As the Charlotte Lozier Institute documents in a detailed report, there are many thousands of community health centers spread out across the country. Not all of these are explicitly pro-life, but some of them are, and few of them are actively engaged in the business of killing preborn children. If public monies are to be spent on women’s health care, it would be far better spent on holistic health centers, rather than the abortion-centric Planned Parenthood.
There is Hope
Both Vice President JD Vance and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have previously expressed support for defunding the abortion giant of all taxpayer money.
“I would like to. That’s for sure,” Johnson said in December 2024 when asked by Fox News about cutting government funding for Planned Parenthood. However, he said “we have got to build consensus to have the votes to do that.”
In statements prior to the 2024 election, JD Vance had suggested that the Trump administration would defund Planned Parenthood.
“On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood, look, I mean our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions,” Vance told a journalist after a Trump rally. “That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around. It will remain a consistent view.”
In a public statement, President Trump indicated his willingness to sign the House Bill as written. “Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!” President Trump wrote on Truth Social. “There is no time to waste.”
And when asked about the budget bill, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt recently noted that, “The president has maintained a very clear commitment to ensuring that this administration and the American people’s tax dollars are not funding any institution, that includes hospital systems, that are funding the chemical castration and mutilation of children,” replied Leavitt. “We’re not going to tolerate taxpayer dollars going to such efforts.”
Those are strong words. Let us hope and pray that a majority of Senators also hold to this commonsense view and will pass the bill with the defunding language intact. It is way past time to prevent Planned Parenthood raking in billions of taxpayer dollars to continue their perverse “health care” services.