Donald Trump said during the GOP debate Thursday that he is pro-life and also “totally against abortion.”
He insisted many women are helped by the organization, even as he said he would defund Planned Parenthood if it continues to fund abortions. Trump said:
I’m totally against abortion, having to do with Planned Parenthood. But millions and millions of women — cervical cancer, breast cancer — are helped by Planned Parenthood.
So you can say whatever you want, but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly. And I wouldn’t fund it.
I would defund it because of the abortion factor, which they say is three percent. I don’t know what percentage it is. They say it’s three percent. But I would defund it, because I’m pro-life. But millions of women are helped by Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood’s 2014-2015 annual report shows, however, its non-abortion services have decreased dramatically, even as taxpayer funding for the organization has increased nearly five percent from last year.
The Susan B. Anthony List observes:
- Cancer screening and prevention services dropped by 27% in just one year, and by 57% since 2010.
- Contraceptive services dropped by nearly 18% in just one year, and are down 20% since 2010.
- STI/STD prevention and treatment services are down nearly 6%, and “other services” are down by 27% over one year.
- Overall, total services dropped by nearly 11% in just one year, and are down 14% since 2010. Unique patients dropped by 200,000 in one year, and by 500,000 since 2010, nearly a 17% drop.
- Planned Parenthood performed 323,999 abortions, a slight 1% decrease over the previous year (327,653).
- Over the past three reported years (2012-2014), Planned Parenthood has performed nearly one million abortions (978,818)
As for Planned Parenthood’s insistence that only three percent of the services it performs are abortions, Slate senior editor Rachael Larimore calls this “the most meaningless abortion statistic ever.”
She continues:
[I]t is meaningless—to the point of being downright silly— for several reasons. Not the least of which being that Planned Parenthood “unbundles” all of its services so that a pack of pills, an STD test and an exam are three separate services.
Undoubtedly, some of those services are cheaper than others: To illustrate this, let’s make a comparison with an actual business. Say I open a watch store. I sell lots of those cheap plastic digital ones that you can get at discount stores. And I sell some Timex and Casio, and also some nicer designer watches. But then I also keep a few superexpensive Brightlings and Patek Phillipes in stock. And maybe those only make up 3 percent of my sales. But selling only a handful of fancy watches brings in far more than 3 percent of my REVENUES.
And so it is with abortion.
It’s impossible to know how much money Planned Parenthood brings in for abortion. Because as specific as the annual report is about the number of services it provides, it’s far less detailed when talking about where its revenue comes from (They are within their rights, so whatever). But it’s easy to calculate, as the Weekly Standard did, that Planned Parenthood gets at least a third of its clinic income—and more than 10 percent of all its revenue, government funding included—from its abortion procedures.
Ask anyone who runs a for-profit business or nonprofit charity if something that brings in one-third of their revenue is “central” to their endeavor, and the answer is likely to be yes. So yes, abortion is central to what Planned Parenthood does. There ARE a few things that aren’t central to their purpose though. As compared with the nearly 334,000 abortions that Planned Parenthood provided in 2011, 28,674 women received prenatal services. And 2,300 were referred to adoption agencies.
President of Students for Life of America Kristan Hawkins tells Breitbart News that Trump doesn’t know the details about Planned Parenthood.
“No one who says they are pro-life can vote for Donald Trump,” she says. “He clearly doesn’t even know what Planned Parenthood does or what abortion really is. An organization that rips apart 897 babies every day, piece-by-piece, is never one that should be praised.”