The 3%

I once read a quotation about statistics which said that “a politician uses statistics in the same way a drunk uses a street lamp, for support rather than for illumination”… I thought that this was an appropriate quotation to begin the subject of today’s post. You see, it’s quite impossible to speak out against Planned Parenthood for long before hearing the following response:

“But abortion is only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does!”

This objection has been raised by many of my friends and you hear this statistic rattled off by politicians and Planned Parenthood advocates. 3% seems so small and insignificant! The argument is that if you defund Planned Parenthood then women would lose access to all the other services they provide as well. This assumes that abortion and healthcare can only come together as a package, treating pregnancy as though it’s just another disease.

How is it that Planned Parenthood is known for being the nation’s premiere abortion provider if it’s only 3% of what it does? Isn’t that incredible?! In fact, if it’s such a small percentage of their work, you can’t help but wonder why Planned Parenthood doesn’t just get out of the abortion industry altogether and save themselves the constant annoyance of having all those pesky pro-lifers outside of their clinics all the time!

There is a problem with the 3% statistic. While there is a certain veracity to the statistic, it’s incredibly misleading, so much so as to be positively meaningless!

Getting to the 3%

So, from where does Planned Parenthood get this figure of 3%? Well, the company provides a number services which, in addition to abortion, include things like pregnancy testing and providing birth control. In order to arrive at a figure of 3%, Planned Parenthood counts the use of each one of these services equally…

For example, let’s say that, on a given morning, a Planned Parenthood clinic receives ten visitors. Nine of these women want to pick up some birth control and one wants an abortion. According to Planned Parenthood’s service usage, abortions only accounted for 10% of that clinic’s business that morning. While technically accurate, there is something deeply problematic here in that it is equating the handing out of contraceptives to a medical procedure on a woman which kills her unborn child. Are these two things really equivalents?

Also, consider what happens to the statistics if a girl came in with a suspected pregnancy. She takes a pregnancy test and, upon finding out that she is actually pregnant, would receive an abortion and then afterwards be sent away with some contraception to make sure that it didn’t happen again. Three Planned Parenthood services have been consumed here: a pregnancy test, an abortion and the dispensing of contraception. Since each of these services are counted equally, the statistical significance of the abortion is reduced since it counted for only 30% of the services used by this woman.

Given that Planned Parenthood perform 1.1 million pregnancy tests each year, it’s easy to see how the number of abortions can look rather small when expressed as a percentage. I read one rather humourous comparison on another blog. The writer pointed out that Major League Baseball teams play 2,430 games in a season, but sells about 20 million hot dogs. Following the logic of Planned Parenthood, baseball is only 0.012% of what Major League Baseball does!

It’s not just pro-lifers who recognize the 3% statistic as a ridiculous dodge. Even the Washington Post, which has traditionally been extremely supportive of Planned Parenthood acknowledges this:

“The 3 percent figure that Planned Parenthood uses is misleading, comparing abortion services to every other service that it provides. The organization treats each service — pregnancy test, STD test, abortion, birth control — equally. Yet there are obvious differences between a surgical (or even medical) abortion, and offering a urine (or even blood) pregnancy test. These services are not all comparable in how much they cost or how extensive the service or procedure is” – Washington Post, August 12th 2015

The Washington Post here also raises the question of money and cost. How much do each of Planned Parenthood’s services cost and how much profit is made as a result?

In the graphic on the right, Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee, provides some figures outlining the profit margins of her former employer’s various services. Please click on the graphic to open up a larger version in a new tab.

Planned Parenthood’s annual report doesn’t explicitly give us all the figures we’d like, but the Weekly Standard has made some educated guesses and calculated that abortion accounts for at least one third of a clinic’s income.

This isn’t hard to see why. Let’s say you owned a jewellery store. It is quite possible that the majority of your sales came from customers buying your cheaper stock and services. However, it would only take the purchase of far fewer pieces from the high-end range to dramatically shift your profit margins. Those high-end purchases could account for a significant portion of your profits despite being only, say, 3% of your sales…

Conclusion

Hopefully this post has demonstrated the misleading nature of the 3% statistic, which attempts to diminish the significance of Planned Parenthood’s abortion operation by unfairly equating abortion with their other services and ignoring revenue.

However, it must be pointed out that Planned Parenthood performs 330,000 abortions each year which accounts for about a third of all the abortions performed in the country. Regardless of the statistic’s accuracy, spending 3% of your time dismembering the unborn is still 3% too much…

29-Sept-2015 Update: Cecile Richards had to answer questions about the 3% statistic on Capitol Hill today…

20-Dec-2016 Update: I came across this video from Live Action which explains this article in a nice little video: