While Republican pro-life policies are most often blamed for—or credited with—the shuttering of 37 Planned Parenthood abortion clinics since January 2025, the reasons for the closures are more complex than defunding abortion through H. R. 271: The Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2025.
Abortion facility closures began long before the 2025 legislation and have as much to do with the availability of easy access to medication abortion as with any attempt by the Trump administration to restrict abortion funding to Planned Parenthood centers.
The Guttmacher Institute has been reporting on abortion clinic closures since 2020 and found that in 2023, there were 765 brick-and-mortar clinics providing abortion services in the United States, a 5% decline from 807 such clinics in 2020, which was years before the Republican Congress began its defunding initiative.
Demanding easy access to medication abortion, which accounted for 63% of all clinician-provided abortions last year, has greatly reduced the need for Planned Parenthood abortion facilities. It has also opened the abortion industry to a long list of competitors ready and willing to provide medication abortion without the inconvenience of having to visit a Planned Parenthood facility.
According to Caitlin Myers, a Middlebury College economics professor who maps brick-and-mortar abortion clinics across the United States, the rise of telehealth abortion has “put new pressures on the older-school, brick-and-mortar facilities”. Until a few years ago, doctors could prescribe abortion pills only in person. Those restrictions were lifted during COVID, but it was the Dobbs decision in 2022 that accelerated expansions in telehealth because it drew much attention to models of providing abortion services.
In a classic case of unintended consequences, Planned Parenthood saw new competition from online providers entering the field, advertising virtual consultations and pills shipped directly to women’s homes. The ability to bypass the Planned Parenthood clinic through the use of telemedicine has already diluted the political power that Planned Parenthood has historically enjoyed.
While women’s access to abortion through telehealth has increased, the pro-abortion politicians who have relied on the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to fill their campaign coffers are noticeably affected in this new era of virtual abortion clinics.
In the 2024 election cycle, Planned Parenthood advocacy and political organizations spent a record-breaking $69.5 million, engaging voters and supporting ballot measures related to abortion access. This included efforts to help elect candidates who support reproductive rights through their 2024 “We Decide” initiative, which targeted 14 states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Planned Parenthood’s “We Decide” activities included engaging with voters through face-to-face conversations, phone calls, mail and digital advertising, and various events. While the Planned Parenthood Action Fund does not use federal funds for its lobbying activities and its “get out the vote” initiatives, its influence stems from mobilizing supporters, raising awareness about reproductive rights, and promoting policies to expand access to abortion.
The federal funds that have historically been given by the federal government for non-abortion services to the Planned Parenthood clinics freed up the abortion provider to use their privately donated money on abortion-related services since such funds are fungible.
All of this has benefited Democratic candidates, including Ruben Gallego (AZ), Adam Schiff (CA), Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE), Elissa Slotkin (MI), and Colin Allred (TX) in their bids for Senate in 2024. They were the Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s first non-incumbent Senate endorsements for 2024.
Meanwhile, Republican candidates have not received funding from Planned Parenthood in decades. Unsurprisingly, a coalition of 22 Democrat-led states has sued the Trump administration for the defunding. Filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, the lawsuit argues that the temporary prohibition of Medicaid reimbursement at Planned Parenthood health centers that perform abortions is illegal.
Arguing that they should not be co-opted into executing what they see as an “unconstitutional provision,” the states claimed that the defunding would cause “widespread disruptions in preventative care and increase healthcare costs which, reports CNN,
would cause “widespread disruptions in preventative care and increase healthcare costs” and would result in “disproportionally affecting women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and communities of color…
Claiming that the Trump measure violates the Constitution by violating Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment rights by retaliating against its protected speech and advocacy, forcing states to “implement a vague, unrelated and coercive federal policy without clear notice; and singling out a group for punishment without due process.”
Just as unsurprisingly, a federal judge in Massachusetts has ruled in Planned Parenthood’s favor against the Trump administration. Judge Indira Talwani issued a ruling that found the law to be unconstitutional, noting that it singled out this one organization—Planned Parenthood—and violated its First Amendment rights by jeopardizing other kinds of healthcare, not just abortion care.
Protracted legal arguments are sure to be numerous. In the meantime, federal funding will continue to flow into Planned Parenthood’s coffers.
But, since federal funding is only a small part of Planned Parenthood’s problems, the pro-life side should take comfort in knowing that there is still reason to celebrate that 37 Planned Parenthood facilities have closed in the first six months of 2025 including the following: Gilroy, CA; Madera, CA; San Diego, CA; San Mateo, CA; Santa Cruz, CA; South San Francisco, CA; Bloomington, IL; Decatur, IL; Englewood, IL; Ottawa, IL; Evansville, IN; Ames, IA; Cedar Rapids, IA; Sioux City, IA; Urbandale, IA; Jackson, MI; Petoskey, MI; Marquette, MI; Ann Arbor, MI; Apple Valley, MN; Richfield, MN; Alexandria, MN; Bemidji, MN; West Charleston, Las Vegas, NV; East Flamingo, Las Vegas, NV; Bellmawr, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Springfield, OH; Hamilton, OH; Cleveland, OH; Moon Township, PA; Houston, TX; Tyler, TX; St. George, UT; Logan, UT; St. Johnsbury, VT.
The task now is to continue to try to change hearts and minds about abortion, including “medication” abortion. While polls indicate that almost 73% of Americans ages 18 to 29 support legal abortion, their support is less rigid and militant than that of the Baby Boom generation. Many of these Gen Zers are still forming their beliefs. Providing safe, non-judgmental spaces where they can ask questions and explore alternatives encourages genuine growth and transformation. Traditional authority figures are less persuasive than relatable peer voices, social media influencers, or content creators on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and emerging digital spaces.
All of these alternatives offer Gen Z an opportunity to reexamine their assumptions, especially as the influence of Planned Parenthood’s messaging wanes.
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Our state is Planned Parenthood free. Praise God. We have other troubles for sure but that one’s gone.
Let’s see if we’ve got this right: defunding PP is “disproportionately affecting… LGBTQ+ individuals…” Conceptual incest? LGBTQ is, itself, anti-binary and anti-birth.
And, then, in 2024 PP spent $69.5 million on political campaigns while also raking in $800 million in now-terminated federal funds. The biblical multiplication of bread!
And, too, the constitutional freedom of PP is violated by restricting it’s access to part of the $1.3 Trillion ($1,300 Billion) of fiat paper used to fill out the annual federal spending spree (29% of $6.5 Trillion annual “budget”)…
We then read that “The task now is to continue to try to change hearts and minds [of Generation Z] about abortion, including ‘medication’ abortion.”
True enough. The message should include something about miniaturization…the room-sized IBM mainframe computers that first sent men to the moon have been miniaturized into a computer chip; some 13.8 billion years ago the entire universe began unfolding from a unique and miniature singularity the size of “a point of zero size and infinite density;” each unique human person develops from a miniature and unique genome composed of three billion pairs of DNA (distinct from both the father and the mother…”it’s my body”?)…and anonymous/mail-order Mifepristone miniaturizes Auschwitz (346 acres) to the size of a pill in a home medicine cabinet.
Message for Generation Z…”Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
You can be certain that the closing of Planned Parenthood abortuariums have NOTHING to do with Democrats.
I agree, but it probably didn’t have a great deal to do with the Establishment GOP either.
Word to the wise: the Guttmacher Institute is the research arm of Planned Parenthood itself. Never cite them without double and triple checking the information, even if it seems innocuous, and never cite them unless you also mention exactly what they are and who they work for.
The closure of PP surgical abortion clinics, along with their attendant organizations of social support, is welcome. But inadequate.
Abortion, now medical, becomes solitary, cheap, anonymous, private, and unexamined. Not the place where “non-judgmental spaces” might encourage “genuine growth and transformation”. Wishful, but likely inadequate.
The program “to defend life from conception to natural death” has scarcely been implemented. Is it not then reasonable for the woman to doubt the integrity of a moral agency which decries abortion, on the one hand, and remains silent on the killing of comatose patients for their organs?
Who can speak to this?
One step at a time Dr.Miller. Inch by inch.
Needed is a broadly non-instrumental way of regarding the mystery that the universe even exists, rather than not. Even the mathematician Leibniz wondered: “Why is there anything, rather than nothing.” My God, a “religious” question from a co-inventor of The Calculus! About real contingency, guru Karl Marx megaphoned that “this question is not permitted [!] to socialist man!”
Not a backwardist return to the instinctive “enchantment” of the pagan world but, more deeply, a “sacral” universe pointing back to a singular God who both pervades and transcends all things. And, then maybe with a gifted and sacramental (say what?) connection to this Triune God. And, maybe then, the routinized extermination of innocent human lives, especially, will be seen for what it is and is not.
But, how does one reignite in the minds of Generation Z and the rest of us, a primal or shall we say an original state of real curiosity? Probably not with data-dump AI, or even synodal roundtable proceduralism managed by temporarily (?) demoted “facilitator” bishops. For the Church, then, how to be “communio” or an “ecclesial assembly”—as the Mystical Body of Christ—and therefore not embarrassed by the Apostolic Succession. St. Augustine had some clues…