Milking Teenage Girls

Planned Parenthood's Latest 'Cash Cow'

Planned Parenthood has long insisted that its core business isn’t really abortions, but rather “essential health services” to women. Indeed, the company’s own annual report gives the lie to that argument—the number of breast exams, pap smears, wellness exams, cancer screenings, and other actual medical services the company provides has actually gone down, while its net assets have risen to $1.9 billion (as of 2018) and it receives roughly half a billion dollars in federal funding every year. And yet, abortion rates have been consistently dropping since the 1980s, and are now at their lowest point since Roe v. Wade.

So where is Planned Parenthood now making its money? We’ve already heard about the fetal body parts trade, but David Daleiden has at least put a spotlight on that black practice. In a shocking new blog post this week, Abigail Shrier—author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters—revealed insider knowledge of the latest Planned Parenthood “cash cow”: selling testosterone to mentally vulnerable teenage girls.

One month ago, wrote Shrier, she was contacted via Twitter by a former Planned Parenthood employee who was disgusted by the company’s “recent roles in trans activism.” The employee confessed feeling torn about whether or not to come forward, and she still believed in the mission of Planned Parenthood and knew that pro-lifers would “jump at any opportunity to smear them.” Nonetheless, she finally felt compelled to speak out.

The clinic where this employee had worked was located in a small town of about 30,000 people. She described abortions as the clinic’s “bread and butter,” but noted that in the years since 2016, when former Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards decided clinics should begin offering cross-sex hormone therapy, her little clinic had started to see 1-2 biologically female teens a day coming in for hormone therapy. My colleague Joseph Grabowski has done the math, and given national averages for sex/age distribution in the population, estimates 1-2 girls per day means that between nine and ten percent of all the teenage girls in that community were seeking testosterone in just the 18-month period that employee worked at that particular clinic. Those are some staggering numbers, given that typically, far less than one percent of a population presents as transgender.

These girls would arrive in groups, claims the employee, giggling and cheerful. Writes Shrier, “It smacked more of the gleeful trips teen girls once took to the mall for ear piercings than the sober medical treatment of a genuine mental health disorder.” Sometimes Mom would be present, but often not, depending on state requirements. In Oregon, Shrier told Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council, you can get testosterone and other gender-transitioning hormones as young as 15, the same day as your visit, without parental consent or even a therapist’s note.

Many of these girls were troubled, revealing histories of mental health disturbance in their intake interviews with a “gender counselor.” In this particular clinic, this counselor had no other credentials than being a transgender individual, and the clinic manager, who approved the request for a specific treatment, had “no prior medical experience” but rather a work history that included being a manager at Wendy’s. Many of the girls had self-harm marks, some of which were fresh. The employee told Shrier that the practitioners weren’t supposed to address any of these, or in any way question the girls’ self-diagnosed gender dysphoria. “We just move on to exactly the issue at hand”—doling out the hormones.

But the hormones these girls mostly request, 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.” Specific risks, details Shrier, “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 come with any major and novel intervention.” The girls were given a sheet of information on these risks. The employee notes that she never saw any of them read it.

Shrier also notes that although she’s never been able to find hard numbers on exactly how much money Planned Parenthood makes off of such therapies, one Planned Parenthood regional website claims that “Nationally, Planned Parenthood is the second largest provider of Gender Affirming Hormone Care.” “It seems reasonable to conclude,” continues Shrier, “that hormone treatments—pricey as they are—now contribute materially to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.” The number of clinics offering gender-affirming therapies has skyrocketed from a mere 26 to 210. My own brief googling led to another disturbing discovery. Gender-affirming care is increasingly being offered via telehealth. Seriously disturbed girls can likely start body-mutilating regimens without so much as ever visiting an actual therapist.

If any of this is shocking, it shouldn’t be, at least at some level. Planned Parenthood has existed for decades now to make money off of real female pain. Now that the original abortion business is drying up, the mass murderer of children has to find a new source of income, and the “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” population, young teenage girls, are proving the ideal source. The employee herself noted that “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., whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation.” Keep them coming back for more hormones, more treatments, more referrals, and you’ve got an income stream for the life of the patient.

Shrier asked one last question of her interview subject. Was anyone ever turned down? One, that she remembers, a boy who confessed that “he smoked so much weed that he was doubling up on his estrogen.” They made him see a substance use counselor before he could resume his estrogen therapy.

But none of the girls were ever turned away.