Planned Parenthood’s Legacy: It’s Worse Than You Think

Planned Parenthood (noun) – an organization that has taken over 10 million lives through abortion since 1973.

Let that sink in.

Of the more than 64 million abortions that have taken place since 1973, Planned Parenthood is responsible for over 10 million of them.

That’s over 10 million children who never knew what it meant to be loved outside their mother’s womb; over 10 million children who never got to grow up, experience the joys and hardships of life, and potentially change the world; and an untold number of women who were led to believe that abortion was their only option.

Time and again, Planned Parenthood has prioritized its profits over the health and well-being of women and children.

People deserve to know the truth about Planned Parenthood. It is long overdue for this organization to be held accountable.

What is Planned Parenthood?

On its website, Planned Parenthood styles itself as “the nation’s leading provider and advocate of high-quality, affordable sexual and reproductive health care for all people, as well as the nation’s largest provider of sex education.”

In truth, what Planned Parenthood calls “health care” mostly consists of life-ending abortions. Planned Parenthood is, in fact, the largest provider of abortions in America today, and it has been for many years.

And what Planned Parenthood calls “sex education” refers to programs encouraging children to engage in all manner of sexual exploration and risky sexual behaviors, circumventing and alienating their parents. Ultimately, this “sex education” creates lifelong customers who will come to Planned Parenthood for contraception, STD tests, and abortions. And now, Planned Parenthood is featuring “information” about sexual orientation and gender identity, even offering so-called “gender affirming hormone therapy” and other such “services,” including dangerous transition drugs.

Planned Parenthood doesn’t just push these policies in America, either. It also promotes them globally, especially to developing nations.

The history of Planned Parenthood

From its eugenic past to its present abortion schemes, Planned Parenthood has demonstrated a pattern of devaluing life and treating it like a commodity.

Who founded Planned Parenthood?

Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a nurse who made it her life’s mission to bring birth control into the mainstream of society. In 1916, along with her sister Ethel Byrne and activist Fania Mindell, she opened America’s first “birth control clinic” in Brooklyn, New York. That clinic was shut down days later for violating federal law.

Eventually, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in 1923. These organizations merged to form the Birth Control Federation of America in 1939. After the events of Nazi Germany made the language of eugenics and population control unpopular (language often used by Sanger and advocates of birth control), the Birth Control Federation of America changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

Margaret Sanger and eugenics

For decades, Planned Parenthood has struggled with its founder’s support for eugenics, which it now describes as “an inherently racist and ableist ideology.” Eugenics is an ideology that seeks to “improve” humanity through selective “breeding.” Eugenic practices involve using birth control, forced or voluntary sterilization, and other methods to weed out “undesirable” traits such as mental illnesses and physical disabilities, or to reduce the populations of specific demographics such as African Americans.

It’s well known (and admitted by Planned Parenthood) that Margaret Sanger spoke to a Ku Klux Klan group to gain support for birth control, supported the U.S. Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision allowing the sterilization of people deemed “unfit” without their consent, and backed experimental birth control pill trials on hundreds of Puerto Rican women without telling them of the drug’s experimental nature or potentially dangerous side effects.

In 2021, Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson published an op-ed in The New York Times titled in part, “We’re done making excuses for our Founder.” But McGill Johnson also wrote that “the facts are complicated” and “whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question.”

Regardless of whether Planned Parenthood fully owns up to the reprehensible beliefs of its founder, what is clear is Sanger’s legacy. It isn’t an accident that Planned Parenthood facilities are located disproportionately in neighborhoods with high numbers of racial minorities. It isn’t an accident that a radical commitment to eugenics and birth control turned into a radical commitment to abortion and ending unborn life.

What does Planned Parenthood do?

Planned Parenthood’s stated mission is to “provide the high-quality inclusive and comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care services all people need and deserve — with respect and compassion.”

While the organization tries to portray itself as providing holistic healthcare to women, its primary goal is clear: to be America’s number-one abortion provider.

And the numbers speak for themselves.

According to Planned Parenthood’s 2024-2025 Annual Report, the organization performed 434,450 abortions that year. This represents about an 8 percent increase (more than 32,200 abortions) from the previous year, and about a 34 percent increase since 2014.

Planned Parenthood likes to boast of the other services that it provides, such as cancer screenings. But again, the abortion provider’s own annual reports show where its priorities lie.

In the 2024-25 report, cancer screening and prevention services made up just 4 percent of everything Planned Parenthood did that year—and the organization’s own numbers, tracked by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, show those services have dropped 43 percent since 2014, including a 55 percent decline in breast exams and a 38 percent decline in pap tests.

The same trend holds for prenatal care and contraception. Prenatal services are down 56 percent since 2014. Contraceptive services are down 23 percent over the same span. Besides abortion, the only major category of services Planned Parenthood has substantially increased is testing for sexually transmitted diseases and infections, which climbed to 5.5 million in 2024-25.

But one of the most telling statistics is this: in 2023-24, abortions made up almost 97 percent of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy resolution services, while prenatal services, miscarriage care, and adoption referrals accounted for only 1.7 percent (7,685), 0.6 percent (2,852), and 0.7 percent (3,038), respectively. In other words, Planned Parenthood performed 143 abortions for every adoption referral.

When it comes to unborn children, Planned Parenthood seeks to end life, not preserve it, and the organization’s own numbers reveal that it is far more concerned about driving women to its profit-making and life-ending abortions over providing them with actual health services.

What percent of Planned Parenthood’s business is abortion?

To rebuff these glaring statistics, Planned Parenthood has repeatedly claimed that abortion only consists of 3 to 4 percent of what it does. But even left-leaning magazines such as Slate have called that “The Most Meaningless Abortion Statistic Ever,” and The Washington Post has called it “misleading.” Listen to former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson describe how Planned Parenthood “counts” its “services.”

Planned Parenthood and sex education

One of the ways that Planned Parenthood ensures a future customer base is by seeking to influence children and teenagers through sex education and by being present in schools.

In 2021, a teacher at a middle school in Tacoma, Washington, distributed Planned Parenthood flyers to eighth-graders. The flyer detailed at what age students could give consent to have sex with someone younger or older. For example, it says, “It is not a crime if you are … 11 and have sex with somebody 2 years older or less … 12 to 13 and have sex with somebody who is 3 years older or less … 14 or 15 and have sex with somebody who is 4 years older or less.” Additionally, the flyer tells students at what age they can obtain abortions, birth control, and STD tests without parental notice or consent.

On high school campuses, Planned Parenthood has also sought to establish “Wellbeing Centers” that “provide a range of sexual health services,” including “pregnancy options counseling.” The organization also supplies schools with contraceptives that are easily accessible to students.

In addition, Planned Parenthood has numerous online resources to provide “education” and circumvent parents. The section of its website devoted to reaching teens has articles on everything from sex and pornography to sexual orientation and gender identity, complete with videos like “Consent 101: How Do You Know if Someone Wants to Have Sex?” Many of the videos have explicit animations of various sexual acts, including the use of sex toys, or feature live people engaging in what could rightly be called softcore pornography.

In a video posted in January 2024 titled, “What is Virginity?”, Planned Parenthood falsely tells young people that virginity “is a completely made-up concept … that was created simply to control and shame people, mainly women.” A Planned Parenthood instructor further encourages people to be sexually active by suggesting that they won’t be “losing” anything, but rather “gaining things like intimacy, self-insight, pleasure, and empowerment.”

Planned Parenthood also has a chatbot called Roo, where kids can ask whatever questions they want about sexuality and be answered by Planned Parenthood’s chatbot using “expert knowledge.” This is yet another resource Planned Parenthood gives children to bypass their parents.

By exposing kids to explicit sexual material and encouraging them to be sexually active through its “sex education,” Planned Parenthood can also create a loyal future customer base that will come back for contraception, STD tests, and abortions.

Planned Parenthood negotiating the sale of baby parts

In 2015, videos released by the Center for Medical Progress exposed Planned Parenthood for negotiating the sale of hearts, lungs, and livers from babies it had aborted. Planned Parenthood insisted that it was only recuperating the costs of procuring the babies’ bodies (it is illegal to obtain a profit from fetal tissue), but public pressure eventually led the organization to stop accepting payments altogether.

This action, of course, does not address the underlying horror of the abortions themselves or the perverse incentives such an arrangement might create.

Planned Parenthood and Gender Ideology

Planned Parenthood isn’t just concerned with undermining the sanctity of life. The group has increasingly promoted gender ideology, undermining what it means to be made male and female. And nothing highlights the perils and pitfalls of this approach to gender ideology like the story of Calista Wetzstein.

Calista struggled with feeling out of place among her peers when she was a young girl. Instead of getting the help she actually needed, a therapist told her grandmother that Calista needed to start dangerous transition drugs—or else she would kill herself.

That emotional blackmail put Calista on a path that eventually took her to Planned Parenthood at 19 years old. Planned Parenthood prescribed her testosterone for an entire year, despite running just one blood test on Calista. Even worse, Planned Parenthood helped provide another year of testosterone after the initial year. This time, however, there wasn’t even an in-person office visit or blood test. Just a phone call. Nobody ever asked how the drugs were affecting Calista mentally or otherwise.

Calista eventually detransitioned at the age of 21. But she lives with the effects of these drugs to this day. Instead of providing her with real healthcare, Planned Parenthood pushed Calista down a dangerous path that will affect her for the rest of her life. And when the time came, and Calista opted to detransition, Planned Parenthood was less than helpful.

“I just don’t think Planned Parenthood cared,” Calista said.

“I called Planned Parenthood, and I told them that I wanted to detransition and that I wanted help,” Calista recalls. “What they told me was that they could put me on birth control. Otherwise, they had never had anybody do this, and they didn’t know what to do.”

Who funds Planned Parenthood?

Each year, Planned Parenthood releases an annual report laying out its revenues, expenses, and “services” it provides.

In its 2024-2025 Annual Report, Planned Parenthood reported nearly $2.5 billion in net assets, $2.14 billion in total revenue, and $2.17 billion in expenses. For the first time in recent years, Planned Parenthood spent more than it brought in—a net loss of roughly $29 million, compared to the approximately $27 million surplus the year before.

The report details that $728.2 million (34 percent) of the organization’s revenue came from private contributions, up 6 percent from the previous year. Planned Parenthood also received a hefty sum from the American taxpayer: $832 million (39 percent of its total revenue), an increase of nearly $40 million. Taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood continues—even as the health services it claims to justify that funding have declined.

The abortion giant’s single largest expense category is “medical services,” which covers abortion along with contraception, STI testing, cancer screening, and its other offerings—and which climbed to $1.38 billion in the latest report. Sex education cost $72.6 million. “Public policy,” which includes pro-abortion advocacy, cost $61.2 million.

Alliance Defending Freedom has long documented Planned Parenthood’s alleged scandals, including overbilling and taxpayer fraud to maximize its profits. The late Sue Thayer, a former Planned Parenthood center director and ADF client, offered practical examples of how this happens:

Abby Johnson shared her experience about how Planned Parenthood would try to get women in and out as quickly as possible to maximize profits:

At the end of the day, Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses profit by killing innocent children. Innocent life should not be treated like a commodity. The hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding that Planned Parenthood receives should be redirected to pregnancy centers and high-quality, comprehensive healthcare options that do not profit from the sale of abortions.

How is ADF opposing Planned Parenthood?

For decades, ADF has stood up to Planned Parenthood in legislatures and courts to hold the abortion business accountable for the innocent lives it takes, for the harm it brings to women, and for other ways it violates or evades the law.

ADF has represented two former Planned Parenthood directors: Sue Thayer and Abby Johnson. Sue served as a center manager for Planned Parenthood of the Heartland facilities for 17 years before resigning after witnessing increasingly unscrupulous business practices that Planned Parenthood was engaged in. Abby was a Planned Parenthood center director in Bryan, Texas. After working with the organization for many years, she had a change of heart after witnessing an abortion. Since then, Abby has dedicated her life to spreading the truth about abortion.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, allowing states to protect life once again. ADF has recently defended pro-life state laws against Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses in numerous states across the country.

Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic

The Medicaid program is run by the federal government and administered by the states. One of the states’ responsibilities is to determine which medical providers are qualified to provide and receive payment for certain services. In South Carolina, state law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds to pay for abortions. Because money is fungible, funneling taxpayer funds to abortion facilities for any purpose indirectly subsidizes abortions. South Carolina’s governor issued an order declaring abortion facilities, including Planned Parenthood, unqualified to receive Medicaid funding if they continue performing abortions.

In response, Planned Parenthood and an individual plaintiff sued the state. This would eventually take the case to the Supreme Court. Thankfully, in June 2025, the Court issued a decision allowing South Carolina to direct Medicaid funds away from abortion facilities, including Planned Parenthood.

Hodes & Nauser v. Kobach

Since 1997, a Kansas law has required abortion businesses to inform women about the risks of abortion, the prenatal and postnatal care that is available, the right to have an ultrasound and see her child, the right to withdraw consent before the abortion, and other important information about pregnancy. The law also provides a 24-hour waiting period to ensure that women have sufficient time to consider their abortion decision and that profit-minded abortion businesses do not pressure women into having an abortion.

But in 2023, Planned Parenthood and another abortion business challenged the law even though they had been complying with it for years.

ADF served as co-counsel alongside Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach to defend Kansas’s pro-life, pro-woman law. Unfortunately, a state district court issued an order allowing Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses to block enforcement of the law.

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic v. Moore

Planned Parenthood, along with other abortion businesses and providers, challenged North Carolina’s prohibition on telemedicine abortions, a 72-hour informed-consent period, facility safety codes, the requirement that facilities provide patients with informed-consent information, and a law ensuring that an abortion only be performed by a licensed physician. When the lawsuit was filed, Roe was still the law of the land.

ADF represented North Carolina Speaker of the House Timothy Moore and Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger in defending the state’s laws, and after ADF’s intervention and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs, Planned Parenthood dropped its lawsuit in North Carolina.

Conclusion

The culture we live in tells us that because of the immense pain, hardship, or heartache that can accompany pregnancy, choosing life is not always worth it. Planned Parenthood capitalizes on this pain and confusion, dedicating itself to profiting from mothers who face difficult circumstances and from the killing of their innocent unborn children through abortion.

But women and children are worth more than Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.

Life is a human right. Life is beautiful. Yes, life is challenging, but life is always worth it.