Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocacy organizations received nearly $2 billion in federal funding over a three-year span, according to a new government report.
The Government Accountability Office disclosed in a Tuesday report that $1.89 billion in federal dollars was allocated to multiple different pro-abortion organizations, including those that perform abortion, over the three-year period from 2019 to 2021. Planned Parenthood received the overwhelming bulk of the sum, a whopping $1.78 billion, during the three-year period, all while it performed 1.11 million abortions.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who requested in January 2022 that GAO produce this report, told The Daily Wire that the staggering amount of funding should shock Americans, whether they support abortion or not.
“We regularly hear from people — whether they’re pro-choice or pro-abortion — they don’t think taxpayer dollars should be used for this,” Blackburn said in a Monday interview. “You’re looking at close to 600 million federal dollars that are going into abortion every single year.”
The revelations come as poll numbers suggest that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to federal funding of abortion. Three out of five Americans said they are opposed to using tax dollars to pay for a woman’s abortion, according to a January 2023 Marist poll.
While the Hyde Amendment bars the use of federal funds for most abortions, it does not prevent organizations like Planned Parenthood, America’s largest provider of abortions, from receiving those funds if they are earmarked for other purposes.
The report exhibits the limits of executive action when it comes to separating the abortion industry from federal dollars. The Trump administration attempted to end federal funding of pro-abortion organizations in 2017 by establishing the Protect Life Rule, which mandated that all organizations receiving funding through Title X grants intended to assist family planning services must agree to refrain from offering referrals for abortions, and must also maintain both physical and financial separation from abortion providers.
Planned Parenthood refused to comply with the new rule and forfeited the Title X funding, which was the abortion group’s second largest source of federal funding behind Medicaid reimbursements. The GAO report found that Planned Parenthood’s refusal “led almost all affiliates to discontinue using family planning grants under Title X” in both 2020 and 2021. The Biden administration, however, rescinded the Trump administration’s Protect Life Rule in 2021.
In addition to the federal dollars that went to Planned Parenthood, another $2.03 million went to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). The international organization operates in 146 different countries and works alongside 150 member associations. The IPPF brags that in 2022 alone, it provided 5 million “abortion services,” an increase of 11% since 2021. The figure includes 14,000 chemical abortions that were facilitated by the federation.
MSI Reproductive Choices, an organization that works in 37 countries, bragged in 2021 that “4 million clients accessed an abortion or post-abortion care with MSI” and received $1.35 million in taxpayer funds. MSI states that by 2030, it hopes to provide a third of abortions in the areas it operates. The organization laid out this goal in a strategy document that says MSI intends to ensure “1 in 3 women who have an abortion will access it from a safe MSI or MSI-supported product or service.”
The report found that another $107.74 million went to “four domestic regional organizations,” which remained unnamed and were identified only as “privately-owned providers of health-related services within various regions of the United States.” The report also noted that the groups “operated in a total of eight states during the time frame of this study” and that “the services they provide include sexual and reproductive health-related service.”
The report found that a large chunk of the money sent to Planned Parenthood was “illegally” taken from the Paycheck Protection Program, which was intended for small businesses to keep people employed as the government responded to the COVID pandemic.
“While small businesses struggled to make ends meet during the pandemic, Planned Parenthood illegally siphoned over $90 million from the Paycheck Protection Program,” Blackburn said, noting that the program was “specifically designed to help our mom-and-pop shops keep their doors open.”
Blackburn was joined by 141 other Republicans in Congress in January 2022 when she requested that the GAO produce a report detailing federal funding of abortion advocacy organizations.
“Follow The Money”
Congress has been requesting GAO reports on Planned Parenthood’s public financing dating back to 1994. Over the last 29 years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for at least $7.9 billion in subsidies for Planned Parenthood’s dominance in the abortion industry. This all while the number of Planned Parenthood facilities has been declining, yet its share of the abortion market has been increasing.
When the GAO began publishing these reports in 1994, Planned Parenthood was receiving $163 million a year while performing around 9% of all abortions in the U.S. Now, as the federal government continues to increase the amount of taxpayer funding Planned Parenthood receives, it is now performing over 40% of all abortions in the U.S.
In 2021, Planned Parenthood had 567 facilities, of which 391 performed abortions. Most notable is the increase in chemical abortion-only (abortion pill) facilities, which now outnumber the facilities that perform surgical abortions. In 2021, American taxpayers paid an average of $1.4 million to each Planned Parenthood facility that performs abortions.
Despite many positive executive actions to curb federal funding for the abortion industry under the Trump administration, Planned Parenthood still hauled in over $550 million each year from 2019-2021. One of the signature policy victories for the Trump administration was the Protect Life Rule, which properly interpreted the Title X Family Planning statute to require complete physical and financial separation between Title X clinics and abortion facilities. Planned Parenthood and other organizations receive Title X dollars specifically for the distribution of contraceptives and other family planning, not for abortions.
After a lengthy court battle, this new rule went into effect in 2019. Rather than comply with the new standards and separate its business into abortion facilities and family planning clinics, Planned Parenthood chose abortion over helping women in need of family planning services and backed out of the Title X program altogether. In doing so, it sacrificed an estimated $60 million a year. Many abortion-friendly states stepped in to help make up the lost federal funds, and as this GAO report shows, Planned Parenthood more than made up the difference in Medicaid funds.
In 2018, according to a previous GAO report, Planned Parenthood received $467 million from Medicaid. Its Medicaid funding jumped dramatically to around $530 million in both 2020 and 2021, an increase of $63 million each year.
Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood are not an annual grant like the Title X program, but rather as individual Planned Parenthood facilities perform Medicaid-eligible services like sexually transmitted disease tests or contraception prescriptions for individuals, they are reimbursed through Medicaid. This figure is constantly changing, depending on how many people on Medicaid use Planned Parenthood and what services they use it for. In the last few years, Medicaid reimbursements to the abortion giant have been trending upward.
Interestingly, in November 2020, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld actions from Texas and Louisiana that prohibited Planned Parenthood from being a Medicaid-eligible provider after it was revealed it bought and sold aborted fetal tissue for profit. This was the first time that any state was able to successfully cut out Planned Parenthood completely from the Medicaid program. Despite this, the abortion chain was still able to haul in $530 million from Medicaid in 2021. This shows that no matter what federal or state policies are in place if Planned Parenthood is still an eligible Medicaid provider in any state, it will continue to receive millions of dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies.
This large increase in Medicaid funding starting in 2020 and 2021 could have been due to Planned Parenthood’s increased involvement in providing COVID-19 services and the increased federal match for Medicaid established in the CARES Act, which was a response to the pandemic. Another CARES Act program, the Paycheck Protection Program, was yet another funding source that Planned Parenthood tapped into. That program provided taxpayer funding for businesses to keep paying their employees during the pandemic shutdowns.
Despite Sen. Marco Rubio working with pro-life members in Congress to ensure the text of the CARES Act made clear that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates would not be eligible to receive Paycheck Protection Program loans, 38 Planned Parenthood affiliates applied for, received, and eventually were forgiven $90 million in loans. This was only possible because of a major failure by the Small Business Administration not to follow the clear intent of Congress to exclude Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood is an organization that has a known eugenics past, has proved to choose abortion ideology over serving its patients with family planning needs, and openly flouts federal law to receive taxpayer-guaranteed loans, and yet our elected representatives think it necessary to underwrite its bottom line. If only pro-life pregnancy resource centers had an ounce of the public backing and financial support as Planned Parenthood, they would be able to serve even more expecting mothers and their unborn children.
Instead, the federal government has turned a blind eye to the physical threats of violence and vandalism these pro-life centers face, and some members of Congress openly attack them with visceral lies about the services they provide. In the end, no matter how many political or legislative victories the pro-life movement may have, the abortion industrial complex will be alive and well so long as the American taxpayer is forced to prop up this barbaric industry.
