While your favorite local restaurant was boarding up its windows and your neighbor’s barbershop was wondering if it would ever reopen, Planned Parenthood — America’s most prolific abortion provider — was quietly cashing a $90 million check from the Paycheck Protection Program. You know, the fund Congress created to keep small businesses alive during a global pandemic. Apparently “keeping alive” means something very different at Planned Parenthood.
Let that marinate for a second. Ninety million dollars. In loans designed for struggling mom-and-pop shops that couldn’t make payroll. Handed to an organization that pulls in over a billion dollars a year and whose primary contribution to “healthcare” is making sure roughly 390,000 babies a year never get to see a doctor at all. If this isn’t the greatest heist in the history of government programs, it’s at least in the top five — right behind whatever Hunter Biden was doing with his “art career.”
Congress is finally moving on this, and honestly, it’s about time. Lawmakers are pushing legislation to defund abortion providers in the wake of these revelations, and the details are even worse than the headline suggests. Planned Parenthood applied for and received PPP loans — the same loans that were supposed to save jobs at dry cleaners, family diners, and hardware stores across America. The ones that ran out so fast that actual small businesses got turned away. But don’t worry, the nation’s largest abortion chain made sure it got its cut.
Here’s what makes this a masterclass in institutional grift. The PPP program had rules. You were supposed to be a business that needed help surviving. Planned Parenthood affiliates applied as if they were just humble little healthcare clinics trying to keep the lights on. Meanwhile, the national organization was sitting on a war chest that would make most Fortune 500 companies blush. They gamed a system built for people who were genuinely desperate — and they did it while Democrats in Congress looked the other way because the magic word “abortion” makes them lose all capacity for oversight.
Let’s talk about the “healthcare” dodge, because they always trot this one out. Every time anyone suggests maybe we shouldn’t be funneling taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, the left rolls out the same script: “But they provide cancer screenings! Contraception! Wellness exams!” Sure. And your local drug dealer also gives directions to lost tourists. That doesn’t make him a community service organization. The numbers don’t lie — Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports show abortion is their flagship product. Everything else is the garnish they put on the plate so politicians can pretend they’re funding a health clinic instead of an abortion factory.
And we’re not talking about a rounding error here. Ninety million dollars would have saved thousands of small businesses. Real businesses, with real employees, in real communities. The pizza place on the corner that had been there for thirty years. The auto shop run by a veteran. The daycare center that parents depended on. Those are the businesses PPP was designed for. Instead, a chunk of that money went to an organization that doesn’t struggle for funding any more than the Pentagon struggles for office space.
The congressional push to defund is being led by lawmakers who’ve seen the receipts and are done pretending this is about women’s health. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth the left doesn’t want you to think about: if Planned Parenthood is really just a healthcare provider, why does it fight so hard against every single regulation that would apply to any other healthcare provider? Why does it resist inspection requirements, reporting standards, and safety protocols that your dentist has to follow without complaint? Because it’s not a healthcare organization. It’s an ideological operation that happens to have exam rooms.
The COVID pandemic was a stress test for America, and we failed it in about forty different ways. But this particular failure deserves its own chapter. We created an emergency fund to save American livelihoods, and a billion-dollar abortion conglomerate elbowed its way to the front of the line, grabbed $90 million, and walked out the door while actual small businesses died on the vine. And nobody in the mainstream media thought that was worth a front-page story.
We’re supposed to believe this was all above board. That Planned Parenthood just happened to qualify. That the rules just happened to work in their favor. That it’s all just a big coincidence that a politically connected organization with an army of lobbyists managed to secure pandemic relief funds while the flower shop down the street got a form letter saying the money was gone.
Congress has a chance to do something real here. Not just defund — but send a message that you don’t get to use a national crisis as a fundraising opportunity. Planned Parenthood took money that wasn’t meant for them, used it to continue operations that half the country finds morally repugnant, and did it all with the smug confidence of an organization that knows it has powerful friends in Washington.
Those friends are running out of excuses. And we’re running out of patience.