Money, Not Women’s Health, Drives The Abortion Industry

Planned Parenthood shouldn’t receive one cent of Americans’ taxpayer dollars. That’s the central truth at the heart of a landmark case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear on April 2, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. The incredibly flawed and corrupt abortion industry is a sham of women’s true health care.

I know. I used to work in an abortion facility.

Before my eyes were opened to the truth of life in the womb and the unspeakable harms abortion inflicts on both child and mother, I was a medical assistant at an abortion facility in Illinois. The doctors would perform between 40-60 abortions a day, six days a week. We had between five to eight minutes to get a woman on the table for her procedure and then move her quickly to the next room so doctors could perform the next abortion.

It was a fast-moving train of patient to patient to patient. If you didn’t have the girl ready when the doctor came in, you were slowing him down. He’d write you up, and that would go into your employment file. It was very important to move quickly so the doctors could perform as many abortions as possible, up to 10 additional each day.

One former Planned Parenthood nurse recently remarked on the fast pace of abortion facilities. She shared her own experience in a New York Times article: “Employees sometimes administered expired pain medication or the wrong medications as they scrambled to move people in and out.” She added, “It was not uncommon for patients to be taken to the wrong room and prepped for the wrong procedure.”

All of that is deeply disturbing, but unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me. The focus of the industry that loudly touts “women’s health care” is on one thing: Money. And abortion is big money. In fact, it is the most significant driving factor in the abortion industry.

Between 2018 and 2023, Planned Parenthood (the largest abortion provider in the U.S.) received $3.2 billion in direct public funding. Each year, it receives hundreds of millions more from private donors. Since 2022, it has experienced a fundraising boom, amassing over $2.5 billion in net assets.

But its supporters are being deceived into believing big abortion equals comprehensive care for women. Planned Parenthood takes donors’ money and spends it on political activism, not people, and certainly not women’s health care.

The aforementioned New York Times article reported that, over the last five years, “the national office has distributed more than $899 million to affiliates to help them deliver care, but none of it went directly to medical services.” Much of the money went instead to pro-abortion politicking, legal costs, and marketing.

Between 2022 and 2023, women’s preventative-care visits fell by 31%, and the number of patients seen annually has fallen 60% since the 1990s. Cancer screening and prevention services have dropped by 71% since 2010, including declines of 72% for breast exams and 74% for pap tests.

Americans should never be forced to fund any activist organization, much less one with such an abysmal and deceptive track record, especially when the majority of Americans reject taxpayer funding for abortion.

The state of South Carolina agreed. It rightly determined that Planned Parenthood doesn’t qualify as a health care provider that should receive Medicaid dollars. In response, Planned Parenthood sued the state, and now the nation’s highest court is weighing this critical case.

States should be free to direct their funding to providers offering genuine, comprehensive health care by excluding organizations like Planned Parenthood—whose primary business is abortion—from public funding. There are roughly 200 publicly funded health care clinics in South Carolina that provide a broad range of high-quality services, including family-planning services. Consider also the numerous pregnancy centers offering valuable, free services to women in need.

It’s been my great honor to have seen firsthand these service-oriented organizations at work in their communities.

For nearly four decades, I’ve worked at Mosaic Health, a pregnancy center with two locations in Illinois. We’ve served more than 25,000 clients by offering no-cost pregnancy testing and ultrasounds, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, post-abortion counseling, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and a wide array of practical resources for new parents, from diapers to clothes to bottles.

Yet the state of Illinois works diligently to force us to close our doors. Current state law specifically targets pregnancy centers like Mosaic because of our fundamentally held belief that abortion offers no benefits, especially to the unborn baby. Because the U.S. Supreme Court held that forcing people to promote abortion is unconstitutional, we’ve partnered with Alliance Defending Freedom and other Illinois pregnancy centers to challenge this unconstitutional law. I, along with many others across our state, pray the district court will see the law’s injustice and uphold our freedom as a pregnancy center to operate according to our deeply held beliefs.

But I’m also looking to the U.S. Supreme Court as they weigh the Medina case, hoping they will agree with the ADF attorneys representing South Carolina and find that states should be free to spend their funds on true, comprehensive, life-affirming health care for women and children.

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Kathy Lesnoff is the president and CEO of Mosaic Health in Illinois.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.