Grassroots Planned Parenthood Defunding
Helping Women & Men Choose Life
Building Up Nonviolent Health Care
Nearly 1 of every 6 women visiting Planned Parenthood gets an abortion. That means about 5 of every 6 go in for something else.
And that’s in the states where abortion is still allowed. Where abortions are now restricted, PP will be a major pipeline for women traveling to other states, and people who visit PP for something else will have abortion promoted to them.
For most PP locations, there are plenty of better alternatives nearby. This website lets local pro-life activists know where they are.
26-minute explanation by project coordinator Rachel MacNair. See the bottom of this page for a set of short clips from this video.
Abby Johnson, Pam Whitehead and Toni Turner explain how the Grassroots Defunding project works, and why it’s so important (16.5 minute video). When they use the term FQHC, this stands for Federally Qualified Health Centers, which is another term for Community Health Centers. Video made in October, 2019.
This website is constantly updated.
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel – this website is a resource where we gather information, ideas, and experience. This includes what we found on the web and what’s offered by local activists.
Please send information and updates to:
grassrootsdefunding@consistent-life.org
This is your one-stop shop for:
Matching each and every Planned Parenthood center in the United States with nearby alternatives which offer the actual health care services, but don’t do abortions. This isn’t just the alternatives for pregnant women we as pro-lifers have always worked on, but includes services for those not pregnant: STD testing, Urinary Tract Infections, cancer screening, etc. We need to get people to go elsewhere for any service at all.
Notes from Activists: Sharing information on those alternative medical centers – are they good? Do they need improvement? Are there enough of them? Do they have hidden abortion connections?
Sharing stories on what action have worked well, what hasn’t worked out well and why, and anything else that can help us be more effective.
Also in the information matching each PP center:
Check My Clinic is a project (with And Then There Were None) of Pro-Love Ministries. When they find health code violation documents at a specific PP center, they have a page with that documentation. We link to that page under that center’s listing; we have the entire list on our Health Violations page.
We’ve added a link to PP centers’ Google reviews, Yelp reviews, and Indeed.com employee reviews under their listings.
And in the information for each state:
Links to ways to file patient complaints with the state’s health department.
Links to PP’s press releases for that state, which starts with the most recent.
PP’s affiliates for that state. Affiliates are regions covering several centers, which are sometimes one state, sometimes several states, and sometimes several within one state.
Notes with information and news stories specific to that state.
We don’t need to rely entirely on national politics.
We can make progress on the local level, where the pro-life movement has always excelled.
graphic from Care Le$$, No Matter What.
What PP Does
PP reports STD testing and treatment at 38-40% of their business, at 4.5 million people, while contraception is only a third, and less than half as many people – 2.1 million. Cancer screenings (breast exams and pap smears) make another 15%, according to PP’s figures. More recently, many affiliates are advertising how they also cover Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) and yeast infections. So while many pro-lifers think of PP only in terms of abortion, there are plenty of other services for those who aren’t pregnant that we can encourage people to get elsewhere.
We want women who might get pregnant later to be out of the habit of interacting with PP. It’s harder for PP to talk them into abortions if they’re not in PP’s orbit.
As she mentions in the video at the top of this page, Abby Johnson, a former director of a PP center, says from her experience that to close a center, we don’t need to get all its patients to go elsewhere. She thinks losing about 10% of its business would cut a center’s profit margins sufficiently.
Now with the overturn of Roe, there will be many PP centers in states that ban or restrict abortion that will stop doing abortions but still try to facilitate women going out of state for them. That makes it all the more important to get women (and men) going to other places to get the kinds of non-abortion services PP offers – we need them out of PP’s orbit so abortion is less likely to occur to them as something they might do.
For Grassroots Activists
Matching the PP Centers to their Nearby CHCs – click on your state
Action – Ready to Go – promoting the ones that are already good alternatives
Action – The CHC Needs Improvement – dealing with ones that have potential
Action – There is no Nearby CHC – for the centers that have none
Kinds of Facilities (numbers per state, abortion-only, mega-clinics, those with health violations)
Special Focus: Donors to Planned Parenthood
Special Focus: Health Violations
Special Focus: Impact of Covid-19
Special Focus: Mammograms
Special Focus: Referral-Only Centers
Special Focus: Sexually-Transmitted Diseases
Special Focus: Students and Campus Centers
Special Focus: Telehealth
Special Focus: Temporarily Closed PP Centers
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This website is sponsored by
The Consistent Life Network works with many other groups to make this campaign a success.
As peace-movement pro-lifers with a long interest in nonviolence strategies, this campaign follows Gandhi’s idea of a Constructive Program. Such a program does two things:
- It says not just what you’re against, but what you’re for.
- It builds up alternative institutions to the violent institutions you oppose, with a strategy of displacing them over time.
Similar projects
Several groups are building clinics and/or seeking affiliates which are designed as alternatives to PP clinics and to “replace the abortion industry”: Obria has a few in California, Marisol has two in Colorado, Stanton Health Care has two in Idaho, and Guiding Star has a few in different states. See a list at Pro Women’s Health Care Centers, a consortium of autonomous centers. We include these along with the CHCs when matching alternatives to PP.
Sidewalk Advocates for Life includes in their training advice on moving the women and men going into abortion centers and abortion referral centers to better options for all health care needs.
The Charlotte Lozier institute offers a US map and maps of each state comparing CHC prevalence with PP centers in each location.
If you know of any other efforts, please let us know at grassrootsdefunding@consistent-life.org
Video Clips
The full 25-minute presentation is at the top of the page. Here we offer clips of interest; captions are under the clips.
Basics of vetting the alternative centers (5 minutes)
How are the state pages set up? Using Colorado as an example (1.5 minutes).
Different places require different strategies (2 minutes)
Different people require different strategies – and why getting even just one individual out of PP’s orbit is so very important (2 minutes)
The CHCs have been vetted and found good, so now what? (1.7 minutes)
The CHC has been vetted and found wanting, so now what? (1.6 minutes)
Impact on lobbying (37 seconds)