More on Planned Parenthood

 

Planned Parenthood Clinic Closure in Pennsylvania Illustrates Broader Abortion Biz Plan

By Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D., NRL ETF Director of Education & Research
Another Planned Parenthood clinic is closing, good news, obviously, if it means just one baby will be spared and one mother’s life will not be ruined.
But given what we’ve seen and heard from Planned Parenthood in the past, there are reasons to think that the consequence of this closing could ultimately mean, not less, but more revenue and more advocacy for the local affiliate, and sadly but predictably, more abortions.
On June 17, 2013 the Planned Parenthood clinic in Carlisle, Pennsylvania closed it doors. A spokesperson for the Planned Parenthood Keystone affiliate, which covers most of the eastern half of the state, not including Philadelphia and its suburbs, said it was done to help the group “remain strong” (pennlive.com, 7/22/13).

It helps to put things in context to know that the Carlisle clinic did not perform abortions and that there is another PP Keystone clinic less than 20 miles away in Harrisburg which does. And the Keystone affiliate is one of the newer Planned Parenthood affiliates formed July 1st by the merger of Planned Parenthood of Northeast, Mid-Penn, and Bucks County, which had the Carlisle center, and Planned Parenthood of the Central PA region, which ran the Harrisburg clinic.

Selina Winchester, the PP Keystone spokeswoman, told a pennlive.com (the online presence of Central Pennsylvania’s The Patriot News) reporter that “It was a matter of having two health centers relatively close to each other.”

The 2,600 patients from the Carlisle clinic are essentially being shifted over to the larger center in Harrisburg, which is said to see about 7,300 patients annually. “In trying to operate two centers at the expense level you have, you might have to find yourself cutting services or programs,” Winchester told pennlive.com. She added, “We had to decide to better serve the patients with all the resources we have, whether it was better to merge, to guarantee we would have those services,”
Patient records were transferred from Carlisle to Harrisburg, and Harrisburg is extending its work day about an hour a day to help accommodate the additional patients.

To those who have followed the activities of Planned Parenthood over the years, the pattern is unmistakable. A smaller, non-abortion performing center closes, with the business going to a larger clinic that does abortions. A stronger affiliate gobbles up a weaker one, cutting unprofitable clinics, trimming management, labor, and facility costs. The new affiliate brings in more money, becomes more powerful, and is better positioned to promote its products and its agenda.
The clinic in Carlisle did abortion referrals, of course, but there is obviously a different sales dynamic when the center you are visiting offers them there on site.

Never forget that while abortions have been on the decline for the last two decades in America, they have been on the increase at Planned Parenthood. There were 1.6 million abortions performed in the U.S. in 1990, but just about 1.2 million in 2008, the latest year for which we have a reliable national statistic. At the same time, abortions at Planned Parenthood went from 129,155 in 1990 – about 8% of the national total – to 333,964 in 2011, more than a quarter of all abortions performed in the U.S.
To put it another way, while abortions in the U.S. were dropping by almost 25%, they were increasing at Planned Parenthood by more than 258%!
How and why did this happen? This is more than an unhappy coincidence. You don’t triple your marketshare while business is falling everywhere else without careful, strategic planning and lots of hard work. 

Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that abortion has long been one of Planned Parenthood’s biggest money makers, and over the past twenty years, Planned Parenthood has taking steps to maximize the most profitable aspects of their business, doing the mergers, closing the unproductive clinics, yet at the same time pushing all of their affiliates to add abortion, adding chemical abortions with drugs like RU-486 to the services available at many of their smaller clinics, building giant new mega clinics designed and staffed to be able to process numbers of abortions a day, equipped with the latest computer technology so that abortionists can manage chemical abortions at several smaller satellite offices by web cam.

At the national average of $451 for a standard suction aspiration abortion, Planned Parenthood’s 333,964 abortions represent revenues of at least $150.6 million. The Harrisburg clinic charges a little less for their chemical abortions ($435), but even at these prices, if patient figures there are consistent with Planned Parenthood’s national average, the 12% of patients receiving abortions represent revenues of more than $381,000. If 12% of Carlisle’s 2,600 former patients came over to Harrisburg for abortions, that would be another $135,000 in income, no small potatoes.
Only the folks at Planned Parenthood know the exact figures.

But all you need to know is that the patients from the Carlisle area, which didn’t provide abortion, are now being directed to go to Harrisburg, where they do.
And for all the changes at Planned Parenthood over the past few years, all the signs point to there being more, not fewer, abortions.

Source: NRLC News