{"id":58634,"date":"2015-09-04T07:00:56","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T14:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/?p=58634"},"modified":"2016-12-19T23:02:28","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T06:02:28","slug":"3-percent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/2015\/09\/04\/3-percent\/","title":{"rendered":"The 3%"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Drunk\"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<\/span> rather than for illumination”<\/span><\/em><\/span>… 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\u00a0Planned Parenthood for long before\u00a0hearing the following response:<\/p>\n

“But abortion is only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does!”<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

This objection has been raised by many of my friends and you hear this statistic rattled off\u00a0by politicians and\u00a0Planned Parenthood advocates. 3% seems\u00a0so small and insignificant! The argument is that if you defund Planned Parenthood then women would lose access to all the\u00a0other services they provide as well. This assumes that abortion and healthcare can only<\/span>\u00a0come together as a package,\u00a0treating\u00a0pregnancy as though it’s just another disease.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0wonder why\u00a0Planned Parenthood doesn’t just get out of the abortion industry altogether and save themselves\u00a0the constant annoyance of having all those pesky pro-lifers outside of their clinics all the time!<\/p>\n

There is a problem with the 3% statistic. While there is a certain veracity\u00a0to the statistic, it’s incredibly misleading, so much so as to be positively meaningless!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Getting to the 3%<\/h2>\n

So, from where does Planned Parenthood get this figure of 3%? Well, the company\u00a0provides a number services<\/a>\u00a0which, in addition to abortion, include things like pregnancy testing\u00a0and providing\u00a0birth control. In order to arrive at a figure of 3%, Planned Parenthood counts the use of each one of these services equally<\/strong>…<\/p>\n

For example, let’s say that, on a given morning, a Planned Parenthood clinic receives ten\u00a0visitors. Nine of these women want to pick up some birth control and one wants an abortion. According to Planned Parenthood’s service usage, abortions\u00a0only accounted for 10% of that clinic’s business that morning. While technically accurate, there is something deeply problematic here in that it is equating\u00a0the handing out of contraceptives to\u00a0a medical procedure on a woman which kills her unborn child. Are these two things really equivalents?<\/p>\n

Also, consider what happens to the statistics if a girl came\u00a0in 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\u00a0happen again. Three<\/span>\u00a0Planned Parenthood services have been consumed here: a pregnancy test, an abortion and the dispensing of contraception.\u00a0Since each of these services are counted equally, the statistical\u00a0significance of the abortion is reduced\u00a0since it\u00a0counted for\u00a0only 30% of the services used by this woman.<\/p>\n

Given that\u00a0Planned 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\u00a0that Major League Baseball teams play 2,430 games in a season, but sells about 20 million hot dogs. Following\u00a0the logic of Planned Parenthood, baseball is only 0.012% of what Major League Baseball does!<\/p>\n

It’s not just pro-lifers who recognize the\u00a03% statistic as a ridiculous dodge. Even the Washington Post, which has traditionally been extremely supportive of Planned Parenthood acknowledges this:<\/p>\n

“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 \u2014 pregnancy test, STD test, abortion, birth control \u2014 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”<\/em> – Washington Post, August 12th 2015<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"PPCosts\"<\/a>The Washington Post here also raises the question of money and cost.\u00a0How much do each of Planned Parenthood’s\u00a0services cost and how much profit\u00a0is made as a result?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Planned Parenthood’s\u00a0annual report <\/a>doesn’t explicitly give us all the figures we’d like, but the Weekly Standard has made some educated guesses and\u00a0calculated<\/a>\u00a0that abortion accounts for at least one third of a clinic’s income<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This isn’t hard to see why. Let’s say you owned a\u00a0jewellery store. It is quite possible that the majority of your\u00a0sales came from customers buying\u00a0your cheaper stock and services. However, it would only take the purchase\u00a0of far fewer\u00a0pieces from the high-end range to dramatically shift your profit margins. Those high-end purchases could account for a\u00a0significant portion of your profits despite being only, say, 3% of your sales…<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

Hopefully this post has demonstrated the misleading nature\u00a0of 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.<\/p>\n

However, it must be pointed out that\u00a0Planned Parenthood performs 330,000\u00a0abortions each year<\/strong>\u00a0which accounts for about a third of all the abortions performed in the country<\/strong>. Regardless of the statistic’s\u00a0accuracy, spending 3% of your time dismembering\u00a0the unborn is still 3% too much…<\/p>\n

29-Sept-2015 Update:<\/strong> Cecile Richards had to answer questions about the 3% statistic on Capitol Hill today…<\/span><\/p>\n