Report: Planned Parenthood’s ‘Considerable’ Financial Incentives for Providing Increased Transgender Services

A new report at RealClearInvestigations (RCI) notes that Planned Parenthood will likely take advantage of the “considerable” financial incentives associated with providing transgender medical treatments now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned.

Planned Parenthood reported a 4,000 percent increase in donations – half from new donors – as the Left’s “summer of rage” against churches and pro-life pregnancy centers was underway following the release of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Yet, Mark Hemingway wrote at RCI the abortion giant may likely respond now to the significant potential for profit tied to a growing desire for transgender treatments amid its current reported status as the nation’s second largest provider of transgender cross-sex hormones.

In a recent interview with TIME magazine, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said in her reflection on the overturning of Roe, that “now that we are in a world where we are no longer defending Roe, we have actually an opportunity to reimagine and reconstruct something better.”

CASE

Back in April 2020, Johnson was condemning Republican-led states for including elective abortions among the surgical procedures that were to be discontinued as the Chinese coronavirus pandemic was underway and personal protective equipment was reportedly being saved for medical staff treating COVID patients.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Johnson put forward the abortion industry’s traditional narrative that elective abortions constituted essential health care, but her conversation quickly took an uplifting turn as the CEO declared drug-induced abortions via telehealth technology to be a “silver lining in this pandemic.”

Anticipating that Planned Parenthood would soon be “in all 50 states by the end of this month,” administering drugs via telehealth contacts so that women and girls could run their own abortions from their homes and dorm rooms, Johnson said the development had “given us a lifeline into communities,” especially as the lockdowns were underway.

Now, however, “close observers of the abortion debate say there’s limited potential for the organization to embrace a broader role – for example, in dispensing abortion drugs over providing surgical abortions,” RCI reported. “Its shift in that direction had been under way long before the Supreme Court ruling, but it faces competitive challenges, since abortion drugs are widely available over the Internet, and new risks, since the drugs more easily evade regulatory scrutiny.”

But, in the area of “gender affirming care,” the report noted, Planned Parenthood is showing its growth.

By the time of publication of its 2019-2020 annual report, Planned Parenthood said it was providing cross-sex hormone treatment services for transgender patients in 31 states. And, since then, the transgender medical industry has proven to be a growing market.

RCI reported:

About 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender and that number is growing quickly. A report released this year by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, shows that the number of young people identifying as transgender doubled between 2017 and 2020 and now represents between 1.3% and 1.4% of all Americans under the age of 24.

In February 2021, Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, wrote at her Substack column of her exchange with a former “reproductive health assistant” at a Planned Parenthood facility prior to the pandemic.

Though the former employee supported Planned Parenthood’s efforts to provide abortions, she went on to say, “Having said that, their recent roles in trans activism are abhorrent, and they’re digging their own grave.”

“[T]rans identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc., whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation,” the woman explained.

Perhaps one of the areas of greatest concern described by the former Planned Parenthood assistant was the lack of competent and thorough evaluation for services that would clearly be making significant and likely irreversible changes to a young teen’s body.

Shrier continued to describe her exchange with the woman on Twitter:

There were no doctors at the clinic where she worked. Nurse practitioners were the professionals with the highest medical training, she said. The clinic employed a gender counselor who had “no actual professional credentials or formal training other than being MtF” (that is, a male-to-female transgender person). Adolescents would come and speak to this gender counselor and Planned Parenthood would then forward the counselor’s “notes to an actual licensed mental health professional somewhere off-site, and rubber-stamp approve the patients to begin their transition. This is basically how they circumvented the requirement to speak to an actual counselor,” according to the employee’s Twitter post.

Whether patients received specific treatments — a course of testosterone, say — was decided by the “clinic manager,” with “no prior medical experience” whose prior job was “managing a Wendy’s,” the employee wrote.

In a recent study led by Dr. Stephen B. Levine and published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, Levine and his colleagues confirmed the significant “ethical concerns” regarding inadequate informed consent for transgender medical treatments, including erroneous assumptions held by professionals; poor quality of the evaluation process; and incomplete and inaccurate information that the patients and family members are given.”

Levine continued:

These concerns are amplified by the dramatic growth in demand for youth gender transition witnessed in the last several years that has led to a perfunctory informed consent process. A rushed process does not allow for a proper discussion of not only the benefits, but the profound risks and uncertainties associated with gender transition, especially when gender transition is undertaken before mature adulthood.

It remains to be seen whether Levine’s warnings about the actual “health care” issues facing teens claiming a desire for a new gender identity will be part of Johnson’s image of “something better” for her organization’s new image.

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Planned Parenthood Building” by Fibonacci Blue. CC BY 2.0. 

 

 

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