OPINION:
A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on federal tax money funneled into Planned Parenthood and similar organizations raises more questions than it answers about the nation’s largest abortion chain.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s (PPFA) audits show the organization spent just $657.1 million between 2002 and 2008 from federal government grants and programs, but the abortion behemoth’s own annual reports show that it took in $2.3 billion from government grants and programs during the same time period.
That’s not pocket change. Why the discrepancy?
The report (the first of its kind since 2002) was released in response to a request from 31 U.S. senators and representatives and in an atmosphere increasingly hostile to abortion. Not surprisingly. then, its findings are fueling an escalating outcry to defund Planned Parenthood.
Since 2009, at least five nationwide polls have confirmed that a majority of Americans consider themselves pro-life.
Someone, then, needs to explain to all those people why $2.3 billion in tax dollars have been doled out to an organization that admits to systematically having killed more than 1.8 million pre-born babies between 2002 and 2008 and then reports it only spent $657.1 million in federal dollars.
Has Planned Parenthood managed to tuck away megamillions of our tax dollars, seemingly unnoticed? Or is that much of its government funding coming from sources other than the federal government? Or is there a problem with the way Planned Parenthood is reporting its expenditure of our federal monies?
In just two weeks, Planned Parenthood will complete its 2009-10 fiscal year. Yet it still has not released its annual report for its 2008-09 fiscal year. In light of the discrepancy revealed in this GAO report, we must ask: What is Planned Parenthood trying to keep secret?
It’s time for Planned Parenthood to come clean - if such a thing is possible.
Yes, Planned Parenthood has other sources of government funding - state and local - but historical data indicate it is simply not believable that such a large amount of its funding is from local and state sources.
GAO reports for prior years show that from 1997 through 2001, PPFA expenditures of federal money accounted for an average of 72 percent of its government income.
Yet this new report shows PPFA expenditures of federal money making up an average of just 32 percent of its government income from 2002 through 2008.
Planned Parenthood’s abortion business has increased year after year in lock step with its increasing government funding, as evidenced by the included chart.
Obviously, every penny Planned Parenthood receives feeds its abortion business in one way or another.
For instance, Title X money is not to be used for abortions. However, according to Abby Johnson, former director of Planned Parenthood’s abortion center in Bryan/College Station, Texas, it is used to gain the trust of women in minority neighborhoods in order to bring them into Planned Parenthood facilities, supposedly for health care, and then persuade them to become Planned Parenthood birth-control clients. Then, when the birth control fails, the organization has a built-in minority clientele for abortion, which Ms. Johnson says is Planned Parenthood’s big cash cow.
Planned Parenthood affiliates continue to build huge abortion megacenters in minority neighborhoods in an attempt to polish its image and gear up for the veritable tsunami of clients that will be headed its way under President Obama’s health care plan, which earmarks $11 billion for community health centers.
Is there no end to the amount of our hard-earned tax dollars that will be poured down the bottomless pit known as Planned Parenthood to quench this social-engineering agency’s thirst for sexualizing our children, stealing their souls and dumping the mutilated bodies of our children’s children into our nation’s waste bins?
On May 14, Gallup produced its third consecutive poll showing that most Americans identify themselves as pro-life. It is unthinkable that American citizens continue to be forced to fund, by the sweat of their brows, the organization that commits one-third of our nation’s abortions.
American Life League stands with pro-life legislators and hundreds of thousands of grass-roots organizations and activists in calling for accountability for the money Planned Parenthood has received from the federal government and in demanding the immediate defunding of Planned Parenthood.
Rita Diller is the national director of Stop Planned Parenthood (Stopp), a project of American Life League.
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