As if being the nation’s number-one abortion provider weren’t enough, Planned Parenthood is now among the top purveyors of yet another evil: gender-transition therapy.
According to a recent report from the Family Research Council, “In 2019, there were over 200 Planned Parenthood facilities in 31 states providing services for patients who identify as transgender. Nationally, Planned Parenthood is the second largest provider of hormone therapy to those who identify as transgender/have gender dysphoria.”
“Based on Planned Parenthood’s yearly increase in the number of abortions they commit and the decrease in the number of abortions committed nationally, Planned Parenthood is becoming more and more of an abortion monopoly,” report editor Mary Szoch told LifeSiteNews.
“Planned Parenthood has also become the second-largest dispenser of hormones designed to interfere with the natural progression of puberty in healthy teenagers, which can have lifelong, detrimental impacts on their health, including interference with brain development, inhibition of normal bone-density development, and sterilization,” she added. “Planned Parenthood’s indifference to the truth that cross-sex hormones can leave a person incapable of having children is completely in line with their racist, eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger’s words, ‘But for my view, I believe that there should be no more babies.’”
Aside from ideology, Planned Parenthood has one very good reason to add this horrifying practice to its portfolio. “Trans identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc.,” a Planned Parenthood employee told columnist Abigail Shrier last year.
Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, wasn’t able to obtain any official data on how much money Planned Parenthood makes from transgender therapy. However, given that the organization brags about its exalted status among gender-transition providers, she wrote, “It seems reasonable to conclude that hormone treatments — pricey as they are — now contribute materially to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.”
“According to the Planned Parenthood employee’s testimony, in affirmative care clinics like this one [at which she worked], for teens seeking fast medical transition — the medicine cabinet is fully stocked, the customer is always right, and the light is always green,” penned Shrier.
The employee, who fully supports Planned Parenthood’s abortion business, told Shrier her clinic would get one or two new teenage girls per day seeking testosterone treatments. Often the girls would arrive in groups, going to the clinic to change their gender together as if on a lark.
The girls were never seen by doctors, the employee said. Instead, they were interviewed by a “gender counselor” whose only qualification was being a male-to-female transgender. Planned Parenthood would forward the counselor’s notes to an off-site mental-health professional and then immediately approve the girls’ transition, courtesy of a clinic manager “with no prior medical experience” who had previously managed a fast-food restaurant.
Among the girls seeking hormone therapy, wrote Shrier,
Anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder were ubiquitous. Often, the employee said, they had visible “self-harm scars” and even “fresh self-harm marks.” But, she said, the medical professionals were never supposed to address those marks. “We just move on exactly the issue at hand” — that is, affirming the adolescents’ self-diagnosed dysphoria and proceeding to a course of treatment.
This treatment — testosterone — carries serious risks for adolescent girls, particularly at the doses at which it is administered, ten to forty times what their bodies would normally handle. Risks include deepened voice, enlarged clitoris, increase in red blood cell count and greater risk of heart attack, infertility, vaginal and uterine atrophy, endometrial cancer — as well as all the unknown risks the [sic] come with any major and novel intervention.
Despite all the warning signs from the girls and the many dangers the treatment posed to them, “none of the girls” was ever turned down, the employee told Shrier. “The extent of our intervention,” she said, was to grant “their requests to start the hormone therapy.”
And so Planned Parenthood pads its already overflowing bank accounts with revenue from adolescents who have been duped into believing that their chromosomes are wrong. One can only hope that the employee’s Twitter prediction comes to pass: Planned Parenthood’s “recent roles in trans activism are abhorrent, and they’re digging their own grave.”
