The account of troubled conditions at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country reads like an investigative report from a pro-life action group. According to the 3,500+ word story, Planned Parenthood is a decidedly dispiriting and substandard place to work. A sample:
- “[A] former Planned Parenthood nurse in Minnesota who was fired while trying to unionize the staff, said that clinics were operating like ‘a conveyor belt’ for patients. She said that employees sometimes administered expired pain medication or the wrong medications as they scrambled to move people in and out.”
- “Employees at various affiliates said it was common to run out of over-the-counter pain medication and I.V. flushes. Salaries are so low that it is not unusual for staff members to qualify for Medicaid and federal food assistance.”
- “Turnover is hovering at around 50 percent a year in many parts of the country, and clinic workers complained that they were learning from inexperienced peers. More than a dozen said they did not receive adequate training for patient intake, blood draws and other tasks.”
- “Many clinics are in dire need of upgrades and repairs. In Omaha last year, sewage from a backed-up toilet seeped into the abortion recovery room for two days, according to interviews with staff members and photographs and text messages. … Employees shoved exam table pads under the bathroom door to block the leak. Patients vomited from the stench.”
- “A Nebraska clinician in 2022 did not realize that a woman was four months pregnant when she inserted an IUD. Several hours later, the patient was rushed to an emergency room and gave birth to a stillborn fetus.”
- “Scores of former employees have sued Planned Parenthood, raising complaints that include refusing to pay overtime or provide breaks, pushing out employees who needed time off to deal with injuries or newborn babies, and firing people who complained about discrimination or clinic practices.”
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Appalling as these grim facts are, they are rendered all the more astonishing by where they appeared: The New York Times on February 15 in an article titled “Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis.” In this instance, at least, the self-styled nation’s paper of record deserves credit for drilling down on conditions at the nation’s number one abortion business at the very moment when its federal funding sources are being called into question by the cost-cutting Trump administration.
The Times does cite financial woes as a source of the clinics’ challenges with staffing and basic cleanliness, but its report is also frank about the reality that Planned Parenthood raises and spends vast sums at the national level on politics and abortion advocacy, as well as on extremely high salaries for executives at its various enterprises. But these putative reasons for Planned Parenthood’s dire straits are hard to square with what publicly available documents, including some cited by the Times, say about Planned Parenthood’s record revenue and sharply declining client base.
A fact sheet produced by Charlotte Lozier Institute based on Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report states that, since 2010, the organization’s federal revenue has increased by some 43%. During that same period, its total services have decreased by 17%, with even larger percentage declines for particular services. Contraceptive services are down 39%, cancer screenings (affected by changing practice guidelines but still reflecting lower patient tallies) are down by 72% for breast exams and 74% for pap tests, and prenatal services are down by a whopping 80% (one California affiliate described by the Times dropped its prenatal services entirely due to what it cited as financial concerns). One “service” at Planned Parenthood continues to increase, however: abortion. In the most recent service year, Planned Parenthood carried out 392,715 abortions, a record toll. Overall, its net income for the service year was $178.6 million, leaving it with net assets in excess of $2.5 billion.
What, then, is going on in the house that Margaret Sanger built? One new factor in play seems to be the extent to which Planned Parenthood employees, and former employees, across the country are willing to speak about — and litigate over — their experiences. Another factor is the depth with which at least some reporters are willing to dig into these stories, including a raft of tort lawsuits by injured patients. Some of the problems are endemic to health care in 2025 America, especially the push by non-medical managers to speed up primary care and impose time limits on medical staff interaction with patients. These limits can be 10 or 15 minutes per patient, and the limits become especially burdensome when they are further truncated by the paperwork and data entry requirements imposed on physicians that interfere with their opportunity to talk, examine, and observe.
With Planned Parenthood, these problems exist, but they are secondary to the fact that the group is on a mission, as its data on abortion show. For decades it was spurred on by Sanger’s eugenic vision and elite bigotry against people she viewed as intellectually inferior or socially unproductive — she referred to them as “human weeds” in her famous catchphrase. In the 1960s, under the leadership of Dr.’s Mary Calderone and Alan Guttmacher, Planned Parenthood kept up its eugenic themes and married them to demands for population control and the new client opportunities afforded by the Sexual Revolution.
One can be sure that even for a practice as novel as distributing puberty blockers, which Planned Parenthood has now embraced, the attraction was at least in part due to the sterilizing effect of these manipulations. Enhancing or restoring fertility is not on Planned Parenthood’s agenda, a ready explanation for its enormous appeal to billionaires worldwide like the Gates Family and Warren Buffett. Ninety-seven percent of the group’s pregnancy-related services involve abortion, and that is a figure that never declines.
Occasionally in the past, the media have been compelled to cover the disruption and dissension among Planned Parenthood’s leaders about the nature of its goals. In July 1995, then-PPFA President Pamela Maraldo was forced to resign from the group over her attempt to broaden its scope, increase primary care, and deemphasize abortion. The Times reported:
“Sources both inside Planned Parenthood and outside said that Ms. Maraldo had aroused opposition with her emphasis on reshaping Planned Parenthood into a broad health organization that could compete in the era of managed care — a focus that some of the group’s affiliates felt would inevitably diminish their role as advocates for abortion rights and low-income women’s access to health care.”
Twenty-four years later, Dr. Leana Wen left the presidency of PPFA for virtually the same reason, its unwillingness to reset its work in the context of primary and preventive care for women in need of a range of services, and not just, as she put it, PPFA’s desire to “double down” on abortion. Wen told the press, “I am leaving because the new Board Chairs and I have philosophical differences over the direction and future of Planned Parenthood.” Commenting on Wen’s departure and broader perspective on public health, Maraldo empathized, telling NPR, “[I]t’s really rare that poor women have just one problem. It’s always accompanied by depression or hypertension or diabetes.”
The New York Times’s latest exposé could not come at a more sensitive time for Planned Parenthood. The Trump administration is subjecting federal spending of all kinds to withering scrutiny and has already taken steps to pull back from involvement in funding abortion advocacy overseas via grant practices. Domestically, Donald Trump promised in a 2016 letter to defunding Planned Parenthood “as long as they continue to perform abortions, and reallocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care for women.”
In a policy context of multi-trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive abortion activity at Planned Parenthood, and national and international birth rates dramatically below replacement level, funding an institution like Planned Parenthood is the antithesis of sound public policy. Thanks to The Times’s reporting, it would seem that more than the question of federal funds is at stake. The organization is receiving a powerful message from its own staff that something is gravely wrong at an agency that disserves its clients and bows instead to the material interests of its leaders.
Planned Parenthood’s crisis is, in the final analysis, not about money. Planned Parenthood is a font of crisis, founded in fear and rooted in disrespect for life and contempt for the beauty of sex, the vocation of medicine, and the meaning of marriage and family. Its swath of destruction has now ended the lives of more than 7,000,000 children directly and millions more here and overseas via the policy changes it has helped wreak across the globe.
The Trump administration’s pledge in 2016 is among the most important it has made — something so clear even The New York Times can see the group’s reign is over. The Gray Lady has sung.
