SALEM, Ore. — The Oregon legislature’s Emergency Board on Tuesday approved a $7.5 million appropriation of emergency state funding to buoy Oregon’s Planned Parenthood facilities. The move comes after the federal government in July passed a budget bill cutting federal taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood for a year.
Proponents of the appropriation claimed that the funding was necessary to preserve access to non-abortion services Planned Parenthood provides, including pap smears, manual breast exams, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing. However, pro-life lawmakers highlighted that the non-abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood are already available at the 270 Federally Qualified Health Clinics (FQHCs) and 16 Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs) across the state. FQHCs outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities more than 20-1 in Oregon.
Oregon Right to Life Executive Director Lois Anderson blasted the $7.5 million appropriation, emphasizing that Planned Parenthood lost its federal funding because of providing elective abortions, not critical health care services.
“The only reason Planned Parenthood is being stripped of federal funding right now is because of abortion. If their primary reason for existence was not ending the lives of unique, developing human beings we would not be having this conversation,” Anderson said. “Backers of Planned Parenthood can try to argue that its abortion facilities are needed providers of legitimately life-saving care, but many other clinics and pharmacies are currently filling those needs, including for rural and low-income families.”
The data show that Planned Parenthood is primarily an abortion business.
- From 2021-2025, Planned Parenthood facilities in Oregon performed 20,213 (about 55% of the state’s abortions), most of them funded by Oregon Health Plan, Oregon’s Medicaid program. During that period, 80.75% of abortion procedures were paid for using tax dollars.
- No Planned Parenthood offers mammograms, and affiliates only provide an estimated 1% of the nation’s pap tests and less than 2% of its HPV tests.
- No Oregon Planned Parenthood affiliate provides prenatal services.
- In 2022-2023, Planned Parenthood facilities performed a record 402,230 abortions nationwide, approximately 40% of all abortions performed in the U.S.
- Abortions make up over 95% of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy resolution services across the country, according to the organization’s annual reports.
- Actual life-saving care provided by Planned Parenthood, such as breast and cervical cancer screening and STI testing, are already provided by myriad medical facilities in Oregon and nationwide.
- The most common non-abortion service provided by Planned Parenthood facilities – contraception – is widely available without Planned Parenthood.
- The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute suggested that FQHCs would be incapable of managing the influx of patients seeking contraception if Planned Parenthood lost Medicaid dollars, but the demand would not fall solely on FQHCs. County-funded clinics, third-party walk-in clinics, and even retail pharmacies already offer contraception.
- Recent national polling suggests that a majority of respondents on both sides of the political aisle (53%) oppose the use of taxpayer dollars to fund abortions.
“This is a moment where our legislature should be directing dollars to support the work of the many clinics, organizations, and individual health care providers who provide comprehensive, life-affirming care for women and their babies,” Anderson said. “Instead, Oregon Democrats are once again funneling taxpayer dollars to fuel America’s biggest abortion corporation and score political points.”
