By Kate Scanlon, OSV News
WASHINGTON (OSV News) — Planned Parenthood’s latest annual report shows an increase in abortions from the previous year, while also showing a decrease in health services.
In its 2022-2023 annual report, titled “Above and Beyond,” detailed its operations from 2021-2022, a window of time that included the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the abortion issue back to the legislature.
Planned Parenthood performed 392,715 abortions in 2021-22, according to the report — an increase of about 18,000 from the previous report. For every adoption referral it made in 2021-22, Planned Parenthood performed approximately 228 abortions.
Meanwhile, total cancer screening and prevention services — such as pap tests and HPV vaccinations — decreased by more than 6,000 since the previous report, from 470,419 to 464,021. Pap tests alone declined from 228,466 to 197,617, while HPV vaccinations increased.
A joint message from Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Tanuja Bahal, its board chair, said “these have been the most trying of times,” for Planned Parenthood staff, citing the Dobbs ruling and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“And yet, each day, they open their doors,” the pair said. “They welcome patients from down the street, and patients from two, or three, or five states over. They listen. They educate. They hold hands. They find the referrals, the resources, the energy, the extra minute a patient needs.”
The message said Planned Parenthood “is proud to be the nation’s largest sex educator, an advocate at the forefront of the fight to protect and expand reproductive freedom, and a leader in research to make sexual and reproductive health care better for all people.”
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement, “Planned Parenthood’s business is abortion, abortion and more abortion.”
“Their annual report shocks the conscience, showing that they ended nearly 393,000 American lives in a single year,” Dannenfelser said.
Dannenfelser argued that the data shows that “pregnant women who walk into Planned Parenthood are sold an abortion 97% of the time, rather than helped to keep their child or make an adoption plan.”
“Meanwhile they saw 80,000 fewer patients, provided 60,000 fewer pap tests and breast exams, and even gave out less contraception,” she said. “As a reward, Democrats in Washington and in the states sent them almost $700 million from the taxpayers — one third of their revenue — to end the fiscal year with $2.5 billion in net assets. Vice President Kamala Harris even made a campaign stop at a Planned Parenthood abortion center. In turn, their political arm spends more than any other abortion-related group to lobby the federal government against commonsense policies like protecting babies born alive after failed abortions.”
The Biden administration has sought to protect Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. But despite campaign promises from former President Donald Trump during his earlier campaigns to defund Planned Parenthood, that organization’s federal funding actually went up during the Trump administration, with its federal reimbursements and grants reaching record levels during the group’s fiscal years starting in 2017 and 2018.
Jeff Bradford, president of Human Coalition, said in a statement the annual report “is jarringly titled ‘Above and Beyond.'”
“The sick irony is that they are going ‘above and beyond’ not to care for women, but to expand abortion — more wounded women, more dead children,” Bradford said. “At Human Coalition, we know full well that vulnerable women are victims of the abortion industry because we see the walking wounded all the time. They leave abortion clinics and return to the very circumstances that pressured them to abort in the first place — poverty, unemployment, family pressure, or domestic abuse. Abortion solves none of these problems. And in our experience, most of these women seeking abortion — 76 percent — would prefer to parent if their circumstances were different.
“Our pregnancy centers and partner pregnancy centers provide them with a range of care support they didn’t know they had, and walk with them to a place of stability and empowerment where they can be the mothers they wanted to be,” he continued. “This is true empowerment because they leave our centers transformed. We are here for women and children and we are proud to be the ones who will truly go ‘above and beyond’ for them.”
The Catholic Church teaches that all human life is sacred and must be respected from conception to natural death and, as such, opposes direct abortion as an act of violence that takes the life of the unborn child. After the Dobbs ruling, the U.S. bishops have reiterated the church’s commitment to serving both women and unborn children.
