Great article! And it gets better, in fact, 97% of what Planned Parenthood does is preventive service.

Sure, Planned Parenthood provides all sorts of great services, but they are also the largest abortion provider in the US, performing over 300,000 abortions each year, or about 1/3 of all abortions in the USA. The federal government grants Planned Parenthood with $300 million per year, even though federal funds for abortions have been prohibited for decades.

If abortion is truly just an afterthought for PP, then perhaps it will forgo the procedure to keep it’s massive federal subsidies. I’m not counting on it though. Despite being 3% of its services, abortions generate about 36% of PP’s earned revenues. PP is a for-profit business, and it wants to keep it’s Cale and eat it too – federal money, plus a massive slice of the lucrative abortion market.

Note that PP spends a whopping $100 million each year in “advocacy,” allowing it to serve as the monied spokesperson for the abortion industry. You’d better believe that PP’s pr staff weighs in whenever there’s the slightest threat to Roe v. Wade. That’s another thing we’re subsidizing.

your a guy Andrew… you dont know what abortion means to some women and how much good it can do.

Andrew, you’re an idiot. Planned Parenthood is a NON PROFIT.

This isn’t really an article. It’s basically a bias article stating how “great” Planned Parenthood is and why we should support them. The “1/5 women in the US” stat isn’t cited either. Maybe if women did not have such easy access to abortion, then we wouldn’t have such a big pregnancy issues? Also, with our deficit, some programs are going to have to be cut, and abortion is 90% of the time, not an absolutely necessary procedure.

An article should be written stating the other side of the story.

Andrea: My mistake, PP is indeed designated a “non-profit.” However, if you take 2007-2008, PP had revenues over 1 billion, and excess revenues (basically, profit) of 85 million. If I’m not mistaken, that was the thirty-fourth or thirty-fifth consecutive year of excess revenues. I’m sure the PP executives and employees want to keep it that way, same as any other company.

Bruin reader: Agreed, what PP does and stands for is sick. But this is an opinion article, after all – you should write in your own response!

From the 2007-08 fiscal year, PP spent 12.2% ($115.9mil / $953.1mil total expenditures) on management and general, with just 0.8% going to their national office. These ratios barely changed from 06-07 to 07-08; management as a whole might’ve actually made less real income given that inflation in 2007 was above 4%. These numbers seem pretty reasonable and healthy for a company of their size.

Employees aside, I was surprised at the excess revenue over expenditures for those two years that I looked at (the most current it seems), but I think that ~10% was the norm before the Great Recession of 2008. I would suspect that their finances are more desperate now like most non-profits.

I should also mention that I’ve been to PP before (not for myself) and it’s amazing what they do there. At the location that I went to and times I was there, it almost seemed like a women’s mental health clinic more than anything (a good thing). That women could decide for themselves rather than having other people telling them what to or not to do was probably the best therapy.

Also, I highly doubt whether or not abortion is available affects unintended pregnancy rates. I haven’t looked at the data, but I recall that countries that ban or make abortions difficult have similar rates as the US (and more back-alley self-abortions). Abortion might not be a medically necessary procedure, but an unintended child will necessarily change both the woman and child’s lives, usually for the worse.

As for the deficit, women’s health services, including abortion services, should be one of the last things to cut. The majority of these services are preventive — the majority of PP’s services are in contraception, STI testing, and cancer screening. I would also be bold enough to say abortion is a preventive service for society — see Donohue and Levitt’s study (wiki here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect).

Just wanted to leave one last comment so that people know that I’m not Andrew Kreitz. I’m sure he would hate to be misrepresented!