Special report: Profits
2000 data
The most glaring piece of data contained in the 1998/1999 Annual Report of Planned Parenthood is its profits. Now, we know PPFA is officially a "not-for-profit corporation" and its profits are officially called "income in excess of expenditures," but when an organization has income in excess of expenditures of $125.8 million, that's a profit!
Planned Parenthood enjoys being classified by the Internal Revenue Service as a "not-for-profit" corporation. Because of this, it receives special prices from drug companies and is able to escape paying any taxes on its excess income. In many areas, PP also is able to avoid property and sales tax payments.
But the data shows that Planned Parenthood consistently manages its business to make a profit. This is true in fact as well as in intent. To illustrate this point, the charts below present the profits, by year, that Planned Parenthood has recorded over its last 13 years of operation. You will notice that, in all that time, PP has never had a year in which it lost money. Every year it manages to have more income than expenses.
This type of operation is commendable for a for-profit business, but completely out of character for an organization that claims to operate as a not-for-profit group.
Data source
The organization known as Planned Parenthood has operations all over the world. The original Planned Parenthood group started in the United States and is known as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA).
Our organization, STOPP International, was formed specifically to track PPFA's operations and to counter its emotional claims with fact. Each year, we present a review of PPFA's operations. This issue of The Ryan Report presents the 2000 review.
All data in this report, except where specifically noted, is taken from PPFA's own
documents. These documents include:
- PPFA's Annual Reports
- PPFA's Service Reports (which have not been made public since 1992)
- PPFA's web sites, press releases and interviews.
- PPFA's federal 990 forms.
As historical data is presented, it must be pointed out that PPFA changed its fiscal year in 1993/1994. It went from reporting financial numbers on a calendar year basis to reporting these numbers on a fiscal year that begins July 1 of one year and ends June 30 of the next. This change presents an anomaly in the financial data for 1993 (it is data for only six months). In addition, we have annualized the data from PPFA's 1993/1994 Annual Report so it can be correctly compared with other years.
PPFA continues to report its "service" data (such as the number of abortions) on a calendar year basis.
Abortion income
A major contributor to Planned Parenthood profits is its surgical abortion business. PP first did abortions in 1970 and has been aggressively expanding its abortion business each year. The last three years have shown a tremendous growth in the surgical abortion business at Planned Parenthood. The number of abortions has risen 20 percent. This at a time when the total number of surgical abortions in the United States is generally recognized as decreasing.
More telling of Planned Parenthood's business mentality is the fact that, it is estimated by STOPP, that the income to PP from these abortions has risen more than 32 percent in that same time period. The charts below show the actual data:
