There’s a bottomless well of money for the Left’s favorite cult of death.
Public disclosures filed with the IRS reveal that pro-abortion groups reported a record haul in 2021: Over $3.6 billion across 181 litigation, lobbying, and abortion providers. That’s up from $3.4 billion in total revenues in 2020 and $2.2 billion in 2019.
Whoever said evil doesn’t pay?
$3,600,000,000 buys a lot of abortions—the equivalent of more than 3 million 20-week abortions, in fact, according to data from the left-wing Guttmacher Institute. For 10-week abortions, it’s equal to a mind-boggling 7.3 million abortions.
Of course, most of that lucre didn’t fund abortions but pro-abortion activism. Most Americans are familiar with Planned Parenthood, the nation’s top abortion provider, but they aren’t aware that Big Abortion is one of the pillars of the professional Left—and the Democratic Party.
One finds the cult’s high priests in every one of the Left’s key strategy meetings. Take it from Pamela Shifman, president of the Democracy Alliance, the Who’s Who of the “progressive” movement: “Donors need to recognize the link between abortion and democracy,” she wrote shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, “and fund accordingly.” In fact, Shifman’s last gig was directing the women’s initiatives for one of the abortion industry’s biggest funders: the NoVo Foundation, funded by Warren Buffett, the single biggest funder of abortions in human history.
Death by Politics
So who are these groups?
At the top of the list, unsurprisingly is Planned Parenthood and its 74 state and regional affiliates. Between them, they pulled in a stunning $1.2 billion in 2021 and spent $1.1 billion of it.
NARAL, the oldest abortion lobbying group in the country, reported $33.5 million total revenues across its network. The National Network of Abortion Funds and its affiliates reported another $18 million in revenues that year.
The National Abortion Federation pulled in nearly $70 million in 2021. The federation is the professional association for abortion practitioners. The Guttmacher Institute—Big Abortion’s top think tank—reported another $19 million in revenues.
I’ve documented how Pathfinder International—one of the left’s most powerful and least-reported-on groups—uses your tax dollars to fund abortions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Pathfinder raked in $119 million in 2021. Worth noting is Pathfinder’s close connection to Planned Parenthood: Its founder, Charles James Gamble, was a Margaret Sanger ally and major funder of population-control policies in their heyday.
Although little known in America, the legacy of Marie Stopes, Britain’s equivalent of Margaret Sanger, lives on in the massive abortion provider Marie Stopes International, which pulled in $52 million in 2021. Stopes’ fondness for eugenics and hatred of Jews—she personally sent Adolf Hitler copies of her poetry—is an embarrassing connection the group would rather forget. It quickly rebranded itself as “MSI” during the peak of Black Lives Matter’s demonstrations in late 2020.
Ipas, which lobbies for expanded abortion access in Africa and Asia, received another $45 million. The Clinton Health Access Initiative similarly pushes abortion in poor countries; it took in $198 million in 2021. Then there’s Population Services International, part of what I’ve termed the “empire run on sex,” for which it brought in $447 million (likely with U.S. government subsidies).
The Population Council was founded in 1952 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd to promote population control; it reported $58 million in 2021 revenues. Continuing his legacy is Family Health International (FHI), which pulled in an amazing $673 million that year. FHI receives government funding to promote “family planning,” a phrase coined by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger to euphemize population control measures. This behemoth has pledged tens of millions of dollars to the UN’s global depopulation crusade, Family Planning 2030.
Also on the population control list are Paul Ehrlich’s Population Connection and its associates (formerly Zero Population Growth), which received $11 million; the Population Reference Bureau, which reported $14 million in revenues; and the Population Media Center, which nabbed another $11 million.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, a litigation group that seeks to overturn pro-life laws, brought in $58 million in 2021. The center is involved in a lawsuit against Texas’ post-Dobbs abortion law and—illustrating the Biden administration’s deep ties to Big Activism—has a lawyer up for nomination to a federal appeals court seat.
Keep in mind that this list focuses near-exclusively on groups whose primary focus is abortion “rights.” Were we to expand the list to every group that supports unlimited abortion it’d capture virtually every organization on the Left and run perhaps three or four times larger, maybe more.
No Room for Neutrality
The number of abortions in the United States has been declining steadily since 1990, when it peaked at 1.6 million per year; in 2020 that figure was between 930,000 and 615,000 deaths.
The biggest blow to the Left’s cult of death fell in 2022 with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the individual right to abortion “discovered” by the court fifty years prior in Roe v. Wade. A study in April found that, six months after Dobbs, the number of abortions nationwide had dropped by 32,260 deaths.
We don’t know how much money Big Abortion raked in last year. But a cynical view suggests Dobbs only further opened the floodgates of cash flowing to professional activists, who now more than ever rely on outspending the Right to win legal and electoral battles.
Will it matter in the end? This writer suspects not.
The country is in the midst of an epochal cultural transformation touching everything. America isn’t so much fracturing as marshalling into two camps: One declared for the god of “progressivism,” the other for the God of the Bible. We see it in the states’ response to Dobbs—like Israel smashing idols, red states cracked down on abortion, while blue states declared abortion a sacred rite up to birth. (It turns out, amusingly, that no one was quite satisfied with Roe.) At the same time, Americans are relocating by the millions to communities which share their core beliefs—left-wing or conservative—in the greatest human reshuffling of the past century.
There’s no room for neutrality on this battlefield, where “moderation”—in this case, unprincipled compromise—is the first to die. We’ve been here before. Everyone remembers Patrick Henry’s famous cry—“Give me liberty or give me death!”—but few recall Henry’s warning against false neutrality to his fellow Virginians, gathered in Richmond in March 1775: “Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!”
The future of the United States is either all abortion, or no abortion at all. The Left knows this. Do Christians? “And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve,” the warrior-prophet Joshua told Israel on the banks of the Jordan River.
“But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
Carter Gaskill contributed to this report