California Planned Parenthood Wants To Stop Cuts to Tax Funding in State Budget
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 18, 2010
Sacramento, CA (LifeNews.com) — The California affiliate of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion business, is starting up another campaign designed to prevent cutting off its government trough of funding. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed more budget cuts designed to stem the financial woes of the state.
Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California says the cuts Schwarzenegger intends to make to confront a $19.1 billion budget shortfall could include cutting the state’s Family PACT program.
"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed to curtail funding and possibly eliminate the entire program in his 2010-2011 budget," the abortion business complains.
For every dollar the state spends on the Planned Parenthood program, the federal government provides $9 in matching federal funds — one of the highest federal matches of any program in California.
But the California Catholic Daily newspaper, in a column on Monday, says Planned Parenthood needs to inform the public how the money it receives from the state in tax dollars frees up funds to promote and perform abortions.
"Family PACT is a major source of funding for Planned Parenthood’s multi-million dollar business, which over the past several years has shown ever-increasing profits. And those Family PACT millions do not include additional revenues earned by Planned Parenthood in government contracts and Medi-Cal payments for providing abortions," the newspaper noted.
It cites figures from Planned Parenthood-Mar Monte, the state’s largest PP affiliate, showing it took in $55.5 million in 2005, according to its annual report, 81% of which came from government funding and 54% from the Family PACT program.
The newspaper added that Mar Monte raked in another 21% of its government revenues from the federally-funded Medicaid program; and 6 % from “government grants and contracts.”
"Since the fiscal year ending June 30, 2003, most Planned Parenthood affiliates in California have shown substantial growth in net assets, according to federal tax statements. According to federal tax documents, eight of California’s nine Planned Parenthood affiliates showed a combined net increase in revenues of $91.7 million between 2002 and 2007. The considerable increase in assets came despite repeated appeals to the state legislature for financial relief, as the abortion provider claimed it was turning away thousands of patients for lack of funds," CCD reported.
It also complained that Planned Parenthood received taxpayer funding even as it spent millions to defeat statewide ballot proposals for parental notification to protect parents and teenagers on abortions.
Every year, pro-life advocates have tried to amend the state budget to remove the funding for as many as 95,000 abortions annually. That’s about 8 percent of the total number of abortions done nationwide — and all paid for at the expense of California taxpayers.
Though Planned Parenthood centers nationally see tens of millions of clients, the abortion business helped just under 11,000 women in 2007 with prenatal care and pregnancy help services.
And prenatal care and adoption referrals resulted for only 5 percent of the total services provided to women in 2007 while abortions accounted for 95 percent of the services that year, according to Planned Parenthood’s own figures.
Also, more government funding for Planned Parenthood equals more abortions.
According to Planned Parenthood’s latest report, abortions increased to 305,310 abortions, up from 289,750 in 2006. That is despite the total government grants and contracts received by PPFA affiliates from government sources including state, local and federal governments increasing from $337 million to $350 million.
Looking at Planned Parenthood data from 1997 to the present, the increase in government funding corresponds with an increase in the number of abortions.
In 1997, Planned Parenthood did about 160,000 abortions and received approximately $160 million in total taxpayer funding from various levels of government. Both the number of abortions and the amount of money received from government, supposedly for family planning to reduce abortions, has doubled since then.
Related web sites:
California Catholic Conference – https://www.cacatholic.org
California Pro-Life Council – https://www.californiaprolife.org
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