What percentage of Planned Parenthood's services are abortions?
Executive summary
Planned Parenthood and independent analysts report that abortions represent a small share of the organization’s total healthcare services—commonly stated as roughly 3–4% of all health services—while abortions dominate the subset of services that address pregnancy resolution, where they account for the vast majority of those specific encounters (about 97% in one analysis) [1] [2] [3]. Different ways of counting (all visits vs. pregnancy-specific services) explain why both “3–4%” and “~97% of pregnancy services” appear in public debate, and those distinctions matter for interpreting what the numbers mean [1] [3].
1. The headline number: 3–4% of all health services
Planned Parenthood’s public materials and widely cited fact sheets have long presented abortion as a modest fraction of total services, typically summarized as about 3% (an internal “By the Numbers” PDF lists 3%) and more recent reporting and policy analyses cite around 4% for the 2022–2023 period [1] [2]. The 3% figure is the one advocacy messaging often uses to argue that most of Planned Parenthood’s work is preventive and primary care (birth control, STI testing, cancer screening), and KFF’s summary of Planned Parenthood’s 2022–2023 annual report repeats a 4% figure while noting federal funds rarely pay for abortions [2].
2. The technical flip side: pregnancy-resolution services are mostly abortions
When analysts restrict the denominator to “pregnancy resolution” services—care given to people already identified as pregnant—the picture changes dramatically: abortion accounts for roughly 97% of that category in the 2020–21 data analyzed by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which highlights that prenatal care, miscarriage treatment, and adoption referrals together made up only a few percent of pregnancy-related services in that reporting year [3]. This is the origin of frequently cited claims that the vast majority of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy-related encounters result in abortion, a narrower statistic that is technically accurate for the services counted but can be misleading when generalized to the organization’s total work [3].
3. Why the same organization can be described two ways
The difference stems from counting methods: the “3–4%” figure divides abortions by total health services across millions of patient encounters—so contraception visits, STI tests, cancer screenings and other preventive services form a large denominator—whereas the ~97% figure divides abortions by a much smaller set of pregnancy-targeted services, excluding the many non-pregnancy visits entirely [1] [3]. Both statements can be true simultaneously; they simply answer different questions about what proportion of which services are abortions [1] [3].
4. How advocates and critics use the numbers
Pro-choice advocates and Planned Parenthood emphasize the 3–4% figure to argue that federal and state funding supports a broad spectrum of preventive care and that abortion is a minority part of the mix [2] [4]. Anti-abortion groups and some analysts emphasize the pregnancy-resolution split and the raw abortion counts (hundreds of thousands per year) to frame abortion as central to the organization’s pregnancy care mission [3] [5]. Outside groups offering “fact sheets” may have explicit agendas—Lozier Institute is an anti-abortion research organization and its framing highlights abortion totals and pregnancy-service ratios, while Planned Parenthood’s own materials contextualize services differently—readers should note those biases when comparing claims [6] [3] [1].
5. Limits of the available reporting and what remains unclear
Annual reports and fact sheets provide the raw numbers used to compute percentages, but differences in what is counted (visits vs. services vs. patients), time lags in service data, and the potential exclusion of referral-only activities complicate precise comparisons across years and authors [5] [6] [7]. The reporting available in the provided sources supports the headline: abortions are about 3–4% of all Planned Parenthood health services, and they make up about 97% of the narrowly defined pregnancy-resolution services in certain reported years, but fuller context—such as how visits are categorized and how referral services are recorded—requires reviewing the primary annual-report accounting tables directly [1] [3] [7].