Condom Follow Up
I noted before that Consumer Reports ranked Planned Parenthood’s free condoms lowest in their recent condom test. Meanwhile, J Bowen notes:
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation’s most frequent provider of abortions, is performing more of the procedures than ever — albeit in fewer clinics — and relying increasingly on the revenue generated from abortions, according to its Fiscal Year 2004 annual report.
Dave Halliday links to the online CR rankings and the PP annual report. He smells a lawsuit.
January 27th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
Hmm, this is interesting. Abortions were on the decline all throughout the “morally bankrupt” Clinton years. So are abortions now on the rise again, now that Bush’s magical “abstienence only” is getting the star treatment?
As delicious as the irony of that would be, I suspect (just speculating, haven’t seen numbers) that there are now fewer alterantives to PPH for obtaining abortions than there have been in the past, and that though the abortion rate is level or declining, a higher percentage of them are performed at PPH clinics.
Also, if you follow the Consumer Reports link, two of the three PPH condoms offer score “excellent” in reliability. It is in the “strength” category that two of the three are rated “poor” (and one of the three is “poor” in reliability, also). What does it all mean? I’m not sure. But I seriously doubt it’s some PPH conspiracy to cause more unintended pregnancies and thus more abortions.
(Still, I can see someone suing over it.)
January 27th, 2005 at 1:18 pm
Looking at the PPH annual report, they performed 244K abortions in 2003, up 6.1% over what they performed in 2002. However, according to the AGI, there were 1.31 million abortions performed in 2000. So unless the number of abortions has fallen off the table since 2000, PPH accounts for a relatively small percentage of abortions performed (less than 20%).