Planned Parenthood Abortion Statistics

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) has been in the news a lot in recent years because of its many leadership problems, a large number of employees exposing its “toxic and racist work environment,” and its continuing struggle to keep a tight lid on its harvesting of preborn baby parts.1 Of course, the organization’s highly-paid public relations experts strive mightily to cover up and obscure the truth regarding PP’s activities. It might even be said that it invented “fake news” more than a century ago.

Let’s take a look at some Planned Parenthood abortion statistics to uncover the truth about our nation’s leading abortionist.

Planned Parenthood Dominates the Abortion Industry

People frequently lie with numbers, usually because they want to conceal critical facts, the best example in this case being PP’s famous “Only three or four percent of what we do is abortions.” However, the plain truth about the organization can be found in its own Annual Reports.2 Planned Parenthood does:

%
of US abortions
annual abortions
 abortions 
for every 1 adoption referral and 2 prenatal services

It helps to look at Planned Parenthood in an original way to help people understand exactly what this organization is and what it stands for.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America is one of 134 member associations of the gigantic International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which works in 142 nations on every continent. It joins two other multinational non-governmental organizations that do the most damage to faith, life and family in the world — the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the architect and supporter of the Chinese forced abortion program, and the Population Council, founded and supported by eugenicists, now serving as the guiding hand behind population suppression efforts all over the world.

Since Planned Parenthood makes a huge chunk of its income from surgical and medical abortions, it has been working hard to increase its share of the US abortion market. In 1980, PP only performed 5% of the nation’s abortions. By 1995, its share of abortions had doubled to 10%; by 2003, it had doubled again to 20%. Currently, it has leveled out at about 40% of all the abortions in the United States. According to Planned Parenthood’s 2019 – 2020 Annual Report, it committed 354,871 abortions in 2020. But it also distributed 584,003 “emergency contraception” kits that year, and there is no way to tell how many early preborn lives were ended in this manner.

According to its own 2019 – 2020 Annual Report, 96.9% of pregnant women seeking help from Planned Parenthood get an abortion; only 0.7% get adoption referrals and 2.4% get prenatal care of any kind.2 And yet while it essentially only offers one choice, Planned Parenthood advertises itself as “pro-choice” while attacking crisis pregnancy centers, which provide real help to women, both those who are pregnant and those who have already had their babies.

Since the first states legalized abortion in 1967, PPFA has committed about 8,965,000 abortions. This number is almost meaningless since it is so huge. As Joseph Stalin said after World War II, “One death is a tragedy, but a million is only a statistic.”3

The old saying that “A picture is worth a thousand words” is as true as ever, and we can use this principle to illustrate just how many preborn people have died at the hands of Planned Parenthood abortionists. We can have a tremendous impact by using our imaginations to relate the abortion issue to everyday images that people are familiar with. Here are some examples:

  • Genocides: Historians list 34 genocides that took place during the bloodiest century in the history of the world, the twentieth century. If it were ranked as the executor and enabler of a genocide of preborn children, Planned Parenthood would rank fourth — behind only Mao Zadong’s 60 million, Stalin’s 40 million, and Hitler’s 30 million, and ranking far ahead of Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Idi Amin and Benito Mussolini.
  • Holding Hands: If the 9 million babies aborted by Planned Parenthood had been born and had grown up, then got together to hold hands, the resulting line would stretch ten thousand miles ― the distance between New York City and Sydney, Australia!
  • The Dead States: Planned Parenthood’s legion of abortionists have killed a number of children equal to the population of the entire states of New Jersey or Virginia ― or the entire population of New York City.

Of course, Planned Parenthood’s leaders ignore these appalling statistics and vigorously engage in the number one tactic of the culture of death ― distraction.

For example, PP’s leaders tell us “Hey, look. We aren’t so bad. Only 3% of what we do are abortions! This means that 97% of what we do is beneficial.” Some say that the Devil always tells us the truth ― but only that part of the truth that he wants us to hear. It is true (kind of) that Planned Parenthood’s 2019 – 2020 Annual Report shows that abortions are 3% of what it offers. Fifty-two percent of its services are STI testing and treatment, 25% is birth control, and its other services account for 20% of its visits.

However, an abortion is profoundly morally different from STI testing or a pregnancy test. An abortion ends a life; the rest of PP’s services do not. This is the fact that PP wants to obscure. As National Review editor Rich Lowry has pointed out, the 3% figure “is crafted to obscure the reality of Planned Parenthood’s business.” Using this kind of deliberate deception, the Major League Baseball organization could claim that its vendors sell about 20 million hot dogs and other items of food and drink every year at its 2,430 games, so MLB’s mission is to feed the public, since food items consist of 99.99% of what it does.

Closer to the point, Nazis could claim that killing Jews was only about one or two percent of what the Third Reich did during World War II, so why does everyone hate them? They invented the Volkswagen and workable rocket propulsion and made the trains run on time, after all!

If you’re still not convinced, you can take former President of Planned Parenthood Leana Wen’s word for it. In 2019 she explained that abortion is Planned Parenthood’s “core mission.”

leana wen tweet

Planned Parenthood’s Brilliant Business Model

Whatever atrocity the culture of death promotes and enables, whether it be outright genocide, transgenderism, transhumanism, euthanasia or abortion, the fundamental motivators are always power and money. There are absolutely no exceptions to this rule.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America runs a business model that would make even the most unscrupulous used-car salesman drool with envy. It efficiently runs a three-level distribution system that automatically creates a demand for the next level:

  1. To begin with, Planned Parenthood peddles sex education to school children and college students, telling them that sexual activity is normal, acceptable and fun under any circumstances, no matter what type, just as long as coercion and [physical] injury are not involved.
  2. This, of course, leads to a demand for birth control, which fails so often that there are more than two million “unplanned” and “unwanted” pregnancies in the United States every year.
  3. And finally, of course, this sets up an unending demand for Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills.

One thing Planned Parenthood does very well indeed is consume money. Thanks to the above three-step business model, Planned Parenthood’s revenues from 1995 to 2019 have totaled more than $31 billion in today’s dollars (that’s “illion” with a “B” preceding it), of which more than $11.4 billion came from the American taxpayer in the form of reimbursements for services rendered and outright grants.

This allows the organization to lavish money on its executives; in her last year at PPFA, Cecile Richards made an incredible $1,033,274 in salary and benefits, which translates into $570 per hour of work. Thirteen other executives at PP’s national headquarters in New York City make $250,000 to $900,000 annually; eight at PP Mar Monte in California make over $200,000 annually, including the CEO who made $527,154 for less than two thirds of a year of work; nine more at PP of Greater NYC made more than $200,000 annually, topping out with the CEO at $428,321 in the last year reported.

The bloody edifice of abortion, comprised of the broken bodies of millions of innocent preborn children, must have a foundation ― and that foundation is sex education. As Alan Guttmacher, the former Medical Director of Planned Parenthood said, “The only avenue the International Planned Parenthood Federation and its allies could travel to win the battle for abortion on demand is through sex education.”4 In fact, we see this principle in operation all over Africa today. The population suppression cartel, which includes IPPF, knows that if it can corrupt the morals of African teenagers in a particular country with comprehensive sex education, abortion will be legalized in that nation within a decade.

Planned Parenthood will go to any lengths to spread explicit sex ed. It has even published a Stan Lee-supported comic featuring Spider-Man promoting PP-style sex education by clobbering an ugly green alien who seeks to sabotage sex education. In this short comic, a pernicious alien named “The Prodigy” arrives on Earth disguised as a human and sets about his nefarious plan of misinforming American teenagers on sex and contraception. The comic is so ludicrous that it is a collector’s item for pro-lifers today. (If you are interested, search eBay for “Spider Man vs the Prodigy.” They are available for ten dollars and up.):

Ebay listing of Spiderman vs the Prodigy

Ebay listing of Spiderman vs the Prodigy

Planned Parenthood says that it provides comprehensive sex education to 1.1 million people annually, and boasts in its Annual Reports, “Honest, fact-based education and information. That’s who we are.” But when pro-abortionists talk like this, you can be sure that propaganda is sure to follow. Some of the falsehoods contained in PP’s sex education programs, such as its now-defunct Teenwire.com sex advice website, include the allegations that homosexual behavior and transgenderism are healthy lifestyles, and that all such people’s problems are caused by “bigots,” “homophobes” and “transphobes;” that abortion has a much lower complication rate than childbirth; that condoms are effective; and that crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are “fake clinics that spew out anti-choice propaganda.”

Most comical of all, PP believes that men can get pregnant; therefore, the organization recently stopped writing about “pregnant women” and replaced the term with “pregnant People.”

The Takeaways

Planned Parenthood and its many defenders among the glitterati and the press will continue to divert, distract and demonize, but there is no defense against these Planned Parenthood abortion statistics which prove that PP is endlessly destructive, and that all it returns to us for billions of our tax dollars is death and corruption. The only thing that will finally bring this organization down is if we continue to forcefully repeat these indisputable facts.

+ Endnotes

[1] For a fascinating and detailed examination of the pervasive and blatant racism practiced at major “reproductive rights” organizations, with a strong focus on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL Pro-Choice America, see Ema O’Connor. “Employees are Calling Out Major Reproductive Rights Organizations for Racism and Hypocrisy.” BuzzFeed, August 21, 2020.

[2] Page 35 of PPFA’s 2019 – 2020 Annual Report lists the pregnancy services they provided: 354,871 abortions, 2,667 adoption referrals, and 8,626 prenatal services of various kinds. By doing a little math, we can see that 96.9% of those services were abortions. 354,871 / (354,871 + 2,667 + 8,626) = 0.9691

[3] Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, quoted in the Washington Post, January 20, 1947.

[4] Alan Guttmacher, M.D., former Medical Director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), quote of May 3, 1973, quoted in Humanity Magazine, August/September 1979, page 11, and in ALL About Issues, December 1979, page 2.

Dr. Brian Clowes has been HLI’s director of research since 1995 and is one of the most accomplished and respected intellectuals in the international pro-life movement. Best known as author of the most exhaustive pro-life informational resource volume The Facts of Life, and for his Pro-Life Basic Training Course, Brian is the author of nine books and over 500 scholarly and popular articles, and has traveled to 70 countries on six continents as a pro-life speaker, educator and trainer.

14 Comments

  1. Mama2eight on September 27, 2021 at 2:45 PM

    I would like to see these statistics with references sited. This would really help when answering the pro abortion minded.

    I read the annual report for 2019-2020 and could not see clearly the percentage of pregnant women entering Planned Parenthood leaving without their babies. You site 97%, but I can’t find it in their report.

    Thank you for your help! I want to share that information with references.

    • HLI Staff on September 29, 2021 at 10:58 AM

      Thanks for the opportunity to clarify footnote [2] in the article, Mama2eight. Page 35 of PPFA’s 2019 – 2020 Annual Report shows 354,871 abortions provided, 2,667 adoption referrals, and 8,626 prenatal services of various kinds. Of these three services related to pregnant women 96.9% are abortions.

      • Lucy on May 26, 2022 at 11:58 PM

        I went to the article. Strange that out of Planned Parenthood’s 10,374,069 total procedures (52% of which is STI prevention and treatment), only 354,871 are related to abortions. I know that number is still terrible, but please post your links and sources within the article, and fact check. (Also, that 354,871 procedures related to abortion is only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does). Here is the article you pulled your “facts” from. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/67/30/67305ea1-8da2-4cee-9191-19228c1d6f70/210219-annual-report-2019-2020-web-final.pdf

        • HLI Staff on June 1, 2022 at 4:32 PM

          Lucy, the article used a detailed footnote to denote the source of the information. Planned Parenthood counts each service individually in their statistics to get their misleading 3%. A woman could walk into a PP clinic, receive an STI test, an HIV test, a Pap test, a well-woman exam, an HPV vaccine, treatment for a genital wart, and this would count as 6 services for that one person. When looking at the data for PREGNANT women on page 35 of PPFA’s 2019 – 2020 Annual Report, it shows 354,871 abortions provided, 2,667 adoption referrals, and 8,626 prenatal services of various kinds. Of these three services related to pregnant women 96.9% are abortions – 96.9% of pregnant PP clients get abortions.

  2. Jim on August 27, 2021 at 4:45 AM

    From working in neonatal wards around dozens of “shoe-box” size premie babies, it’s clear to anyone that observes can see the lights aren’t on yet.

    Second term fetuses are “human organisms”busily reproducing cells of all kinds… but the “being” just isn’t there yet.

    They are on genetic autopilot, autonomous functions only.

    Nobody wants to play god and say precisely when they are “beings”, but 1st & 2nd term they are clearly not. A “recipe” for a potential human being, but not one.

    The assertions of “at conception” is a sales job, not based on reality.

    I applaud PP for saving so many folks from bringing babies into this world when they aren’t ready to raise them.
    Then when ready, their kids will have a chance for a decent life.

    You folks on this site live in a dream world, in your head.

    • Do the Right Thing on November 7, 2021 at 10:19 AM

      Jim, if they are not ready to be a parent, there are childless couples who can not have a baby of their own who would love to raise their children. There is absolutely NO excuse for terminating a pregnancy. Life begins at conception despite what you want to believe. Science tells us that is does and so does God. You are part of the demise of moral character in this world and should be ashamed of yourself. Please take some time to reevaluate your moral truths and understand science does not lie. Then if your life is irrelevant too, then maybe you need to take a good long look at what you believe to be truly important to the rest of us.

      • Your Twisting the Facts on December 14, 2021 at 1:08 AM

        Then why are there over 100,000 children currently in the system, with 10,009+ grow out every year? Why don’t you focus on them??? This article manipulates statistics.

        • Emily McCoy on February 10, 2022 at 11:02 AM

          The children in foster care are a national embarrassment.
          Those women chose to keep the baby. Sadly, poverty, drugs, abusive boyfriends and husbands, combine to make it impossible to care for the child. We end up with an 8 year old in foster care who has been abused, angry, withdrawn, and distrustful of every adult. Had the mother placed her newborn baby up for adoption all that could be avoided. I understand why few parents want to bring a troubled kid into the family.
          Let’s make adoption a noble and acceptable social norm. The best option for unwanted pregnancies.

          • Amy on May 26, 2022 at 11:49 PM

            Um…WHAT? Did you just admit that children who aren’t willing to bow to your beliefs due to trauma that YOU aren’t willing to try to heal are not worthy of adoption? That’s not very pro-life of you. “Troubled kids” are just as worthy as love as the babies you want to force women to have. Being pro-life isn’t just about the fetus. It’s about every single person who already exists.



  3. Charles V.H.Mauya on December 5, 2020 at 4:04 AM

    For the past 15 years also, I have managed to self – train myself as a prolife activist through materials from Dr Brian Clowes’ materials such that as I speak now Malawi (Africa) has now a local, interdenominational prolife organisation called Right to Life Friends. And this idea came to my mind after I had read “Elementary Prolife Activism” sent to me by a friend from Hong Kong. Brian!!! My prolife mentor.

  4. Dr. william luckey on October 29, 2020 at 7:13 PM

    Great and informed articles. I will read them again when I have more time

  5. Jozef on October 29, 2020 at 12:19 PM

    Life does indeed begin at conception and rational consideration alone should tell us so. We see here the different manifestations of the ‘Culture of Death’ of which now St John Paul II spoke of when Archbishop of Krakow.

    Another point to ponder is whether those in persistent mortal sin deprive themselves of right reason? How else would we promote abortion, euthanasia, the redefinition of the legal meaning of marriage and so on as ‘goods’ when they are inherently evil in God’s eyes?

    Pray the Holy Rosary daily and within the limits of our circumstances we need also to perform some meaningful penance for the conversion of these people.

    • John on May 26, 2022 at 11:46 PM

      Hi, Jozef. Where in the Bible does it state that life beings at conception? The Bible states repeatedly that life is associated with breath. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Gen 2:7. This is just one example. And I am assuming your reference to “legal meaning of marriage” is about the legalization of gay marriage. Does the Bible not teach us to love unconditionally as he does? What many people cite as “man shall not lie with man; it is an abomination” is mistranslated. In Hebrew it means “man shall not lie with child.” Please do not be hateful toward people who do not have the same beliefs as you. You will only drive people away from God.

  6. PJ on October 17, 2020 at 11:03 PM

    Does not life begin with a new and specific DNA?

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