Do Taxpayers Pay Planned Parenthood To Stymie Adoptions?

Videos from the Center for Medical Progress are exposing Planned Parenthood’s multiple financial interests in a woman’s abortion decision, including the sale of her unborn child’s body parts. Congress and the states are responding by considering redirecting the roughly half billion per year we give to the nation’s number-one abortionist to federally qualified health centers and other options that outnumber Planned Parenthood almost 20 to 1.

One of the primary funding streams to Planned Parenthood is Title X, run by the creepily named federal “Office of Population Affairs.” A close look at the details of President Clinton-era Title X regulations indicates that taxpayers may be paying Planned Parenthood to steer women away from adoption and toward the abortions that benefit its bottom line.

In 2014, according to its own numbers, for every 175 women who came to Planned Parenthood looking for supposedly unbiased—Title X-funded—information about their unplanned pregnancies and decided they could not keep their child, one chose adoption and 174 chose abortion. With only a handful of claimed adoption referrals every year and abortions increasing annually, Planned Parenthood’s ratio is subject to some fluctuation, but as recently as 2010 it performed 391 abortions for every adoption. Even those adoption figures may be inflated because former Planned Parenthood directors tell me there is no reporting system for adoption referrals (like there is for paid abortions) and they never saw such a referral.

Nearly Five Times as Many Abortions as Adoptions

Abortion ends roughly 1 million human lives every year in America. Adoption numbers are more difficult to discern, but given past statistics and trends we can estimate that around 150,000 children are adopted in the United States every year. According to Planned Parenthood’s own numbers, it is responsible for 327, 653 of those abortions and 1,880 adoption referrals (see above for doubt about even this number, and these are still claimed “referrals,” not actual adoptions). If you subtract Planned Parenthood’s numbers from the overall statistics to get a picture of the rest of America, you find that one child is adopted for every 4.5 aborted (672,347 divided by 148,120).