Three Planned Parenthood facilities in Central Pennsylvania are closing this fall after the abortion chain suffered huge losses in the Nov. 8 election.
ABC 27 News reports the Planned Parenthood facilities in Chambersburg, Gettysburg and Scranton are closing as part of the abortion group’s consolidation plan.
Local Planned Parenthood CEO Melissa Reed said they decided to close the facilities to reduce costs. The three closing facilities did not perform abortions, but they did recommend and refer patients to other facilities that do.
“It resulted from careful analysis of where our patients live and seek medical care as well as an assessment of how best to ensure the longevity and strength of existing health centers …” Reed said in a statement.
Reed also said the closures will help the abortion chain to focus on developing “online health services.” She did not describe more specifically what that will mean.
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“Planned Parenthood in Pennsylvania is serving less people, performing fewer cancer and STD screenings and shutting down more facilities yet incredibly they are carrying out more abortions and had an increase in taxpayer funding,” Dan Bartkowiak, Communications Director with Pennsylvania Family Institute, told LifeNews.
This data mirrors Planned Parenthood’s national reports, which also show a decrease in non-abortion services such as cancer screenings and STD testing.
In Pennsylvania alone, the abortion chain closed 9 facilities in the past three years; at the same time, its taxpayer funding increased by 15 percent, Bartkowiak said.
“Comparing their latest two year summaries, they received $768,969 more in government grants – taxpayer dollars – than the previous year; marking a 15 percent increase,” he wrote on the institute’s blog.
While the abortion business claims that it does not use any of those tax dollars for abortion, its reports increasingly point to abortion as its main business. Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion business in Pennsylvania and in the U.S. It performs about 320,000 abortions nation-wide annually and receives about $550 million in federal tax dollars.
In Pennsylvania, Planned Parenthood has a friend in Gov. Tom Wolf, who once served as a volunteer for the abortion chain. Nationally, however, politics are shifting. President Barack Obama, like Wolf, avidly defends Planned Parenthood, but incoming President-elect Donald Trump said he will not.
Trump promised several times to sign a bill to defund the national abortion chain as long as it continues to do abortions. With Republican majorities entering the U.S. House and Senate in 2017, many believe a defunding bill will pass.
Planned Parenthood is not essential to women’s health care in the U.S. In 2015, Alliance Defending Freedom and the Charlotte Lozier Institute reported there are 13,540 medical clinics providing whole-woman healthcare in the United States versus the 665 Planned Parenthood facilities, which offer only limited services including abortion.
