Planned Parenthood finally released their 2015-2016 annual report. Many in the prolife movement thought the release was being delayed because increasing abortion numbers would get in the way of their media narrative about their commitment to women's health.
Over the years Planned Parenthood's tax-funding has increased dramatically, along with the number of abortions they do. Their other client base continues to decline. Planned Parenthood knows most Americans don't support tax-funded abortions, and so they work hard to spread their talking point that "only 3 percent of our services are abortion."
As we've pointed out many times, that talking point is purposefully misleading, even to Planned Parenthood's own supporters and their media allies. Looking at their recent annual report, they reported serving 2.4 million clients and did 328,348 abortions. That's 14 percent. They did 1,079,836 pregnancy tests, meaning roughly 45 percent of their clients were abortion-minded.
Planned Parenthood continues to cut clients, cut most health services, and increase abortions. How do they manage to keep their "3 percent" talking point intact?
Planned Parenthood counts certain parts of a procedure or visit as a service. This enables them to count or not count whatever they want. Looking at their annual reports over the years, frequently new categories of services get added to the report out of thin air. Lets use their most recent annual report as an example.
Many of their largest services one again saw cuts in 2015-2016. They had 100,000 fewer clients.They provided 72,947 fewer women with contraception, which is supposed to be their core mission. Their manual breast exams dropped 42,103, which they frequently deceive people into believing are mammograms. Their prenatal services declined by 8,000, nearly half. Several other services experienced declines.
Did anything increase? They did provide 25,553 more STI tests, though they don't explain what those entail; were those blood tests or merely a visual check before their tens of thousands of surgical abortions? They did provide 22,260 more pap tests. Those increases don't begin to make up the difference for their dropping services to keep their "3 percent" statistics alive. Every year their public relations department must go to work with some clever accounting.
In this new report we suddenly see Planned Parenthood provided 226,254 well women exams. They didn't report those the previous year. What makes up a well-woman exam? A breast exam and a pap test, among other things. So, Planned Parenthood is counting the exam itself, the breast exam and the pap test as three services, tripling their numbers.
Planned Parenthood also invented the category of "Other STI Prevention and Treatments," providing 26,042 services. We have no idea what these are or why they weren't worth mentioning the previous year. Also new are 100,673 "Other Contraceptive Services." Even these mystical services don't paper over the annual decline in Planned Parenthood's contraceptive services. "Other Diagnostic Procedures" rounds out the mysterious new categories with 7,184 services.
None of these new services made the text of the annual report as bragging points. There were no announcements of new services available at Planned Parenthood. No media station ran a public campaign touting Planned Parenthood's new advances in patient care.
When Planned Parenthood adds all of the numbers up, they get 9,494,977 services, an increase over the previous year despite a drop of 100,000 clients. Those services are just enough to keep abortion at 3.46 percent of their "services," awfully close to that magic 3.5 threshold of having to say "4 percent" instead. Had David Daleiden not come along with his video camera, Planned Parenthood may have had to start counting "Tissue Donations and Other" as a service to keep their "3 percent" myth going.
The only reason they don't triple count enough services to drop abortions to "2 percent" is they probably don't want the marketing costs with having do redo all
of their existing materials.
As Mark Twain wrote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
The reality—according to their own statistics—is that Planned Parenthood is not fundamental to protecting women's health in America. Their dropping client base of 2.4 million is a tiny part of the 164 million women living in America. Thousands of other locations exist to provide the real health services Planned Parenthood cuts every year.
The only thing Planned Parenthood is fundamental to is protecting abortion-on-demand at any cost.
