Special report: Customer loss
PP's customer loss
Even as Planned Parenthood is racking up record profits, it is experiencing a severe decline in support from the American people and in customers through its front doors.
The latest Planned Parenthood Annual Report presents a picture of an organization on the verge of major problems. For the last five years, Planned Parenthood has been losing ground on a number of fronts. To understand this decline, it is important that we take a few minutes to review how PP operates.
As we have pointed out many times, PP has a three-step program for getting into any community or country. Its first step is to promote sex education programs. These programs are often hyped as ways of reducing teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases. But the result of these programs is always to increase the demand for Planned Parenthood's products-particularly birth control products.
Following the implementation of PP's sex education programs, there is a growing demand for birth control and PP then becomes the area's largest provider of birth control for women. This business is so important to PP that it has historically measured its affiliates by the number of female birth control customers (FBCC) that affiliate has.
The third step is to provide surgical abortion. The demand for the abortions comes from the failure of PP's various birth control methods.
STOPP has long maintained that the way to put an end to Planned Parent-hood's influence is to cut off PP's sex education programs. Our contention is that taking that action will automatically reduce its birth control customers and that will lead to a lowering of its abortion business.
Evidence from this year's PP Annual Report supports STOPP's approach. The report showed that PP is continuing a nine-year trend of reduced attendance at its sex education programs. The graph below shows this in numbers taken directly from PP's annual reports.
The next chart shows that over these nine years, the number of female birth control customers at PP has significantly declined.
This reduction in Planned Parenthood's birth control business, caused by the lessening influence of its sex education programs, is greatly responsible for the decline in the number of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. As the chart below illustrates, the number of PP clinics has declined dramatically since their peak four years ago and is currently at the same level it was in 1988.
In addition to the lower number of sex education attendees, this reduction of clinics is due, in large part, to the street activities and massive education campaigns being conducted across the country.
