Planned Parenthood Has Even More Centers Killing Babies in Abortions Than Ever Before

Planned Parenthood and its affiliates have a few less clinics than they did five years ago, but a look at the organization’s recent efforts and activities show it has taken steps to ensure its abortion business stays busy even after Dobbs.  Dobbs is, of course, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe in June of 2022 and made it possible for states to prohibit abortion and protect innocent unborn children from destruction.

Here’s an overview of what we found.

*In 2020, Planned Parenthood listed 641 clinics on its website, 388 of which performed abortion. While the overall count has dropped to 585, the number of abortion-offering clinics has risen to 398.

*Continuing a trend that goes back several years, many smaller affiliates with only a few clinics continue to be absorbed into larger, richer, more politically powerful affiliates, so that a lot of these larger affiliates now have operations covering multiple states.

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*By our count, there were 57 affiliates in 2020, but just 48 in 2025. (For the record, there were over a hundred as recently as 2010.)  Some were just several affiliates in a given state combining to form a larger state affiliate (e.g., becoming Planned Parenthood of Greater New York) but others joined affiliates on the other side of the country (e.g., Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky joined a large affiliate in the Northwest to become Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky).

Here’s the breakdown on the clinics.

The number of clinics would have been even smaller, but this time around, 45 of those 594 clinics are “virtual.” Virtual clinics are not brick-and-mortar buildings at a fixed address. They are some sort of interactive website where patients can log on or call up and chat with a clinician about their health issues, get prescriptions for contraceptives or even treatment for STDs (sexually transmitted diseases).

Many of these virtual clinics also offer abortion pills which can be prescribed and delivered by mail without a woman ever having to come in for an appointment or exam.

While just 159 of Planned Parenthood’s clinics perform surgical or “in clinic” abortions, nearly all (396) of Planned Parenthood’s abortion performing clinics offer chemical abortions with mifepristone. Notably, at least 70 advertise that they make the pills available to women up to 12 weeks LMP (pregnancy measured from a woman’s last menstrual period), which is two weeks past the government’s official authorized 10 week protocol.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) limited use of these drugs to 10 weeks LMP because complications to women increased and efficacy decreased with increasing gestational age, that is, the older the baby about to be killed.

The last five years reveals a subtle but significant change in how late chemical abortions are offered at Planned Parenthood. There seems to be a unified shift in the extension of how long Planned Parenthood clinics offer chemical abortion by at least a week across the country, despite there being no change from the FDA extending the cut-off.

For example, in 2020, 286 clinics offered chemical abortions at 10 weeks, with no clinics offering chemical abortions after 10 weeks. However, in 2025, 282 clinics now offer abortion at 11 weeks and, as referenced above, more than 70 clinics offering it at 12 weeks.

Most of the Planned Parenthood clinics that do surgical abortions advertise their willingness to do late abortions. In 2025, 113 clinics indicate they are willing to perform abortions at 14 weeks gestation or more; 58 say they’ll perform abortions of at least 19 weeks. A dozen say they’ll do them at 23 weeks plus. Four in California and one in Oregon advertise abortions at 24 weeks, and one in Illinois says they’ll even take women at 26 weeks!

We do not yet know how many abortions Planned Parenthood performed in 2025. But the number it reported in its 2022-2023 Annual Report would make it responsible for nearly 38% of abortions the Guttmacher Institute says were performed in the U.S. in 2023.

Fluctuations in the States

One might assume that most of the closing clinics were in the states with new protections in place for the unborn after Dobbs. This is not entirely correct.

A lot of “red states” (ones passing pro-life protections after Dobbs) did see the number of abortion performing  Planned Parenthood clinics in their states drop to zero – Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas. (Kentucky and Louisiana each had two Planned Parenthood clinics in both 2020 and 2025, but neither offered abortions in either of our measured years. North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming either had no clinics previously or had a clinic that didn’t provide abortion in 2020 or 2025).

Planned Parenthood actually kept most of these clinics open after Dobbs, though, often as quasi “travel agencies” arranging for women to travel to affiliated clinics in other states which still legally performed abortions.

There were drops in the number of brick-and-mortar Planned Parenthood clinics in Indiana (-7), Texas (-5), Florida (-4). Idaho, Iowa (-2), Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Alabama (-1). However, the actual numbers of such clinics in other states that passed protections for the unborn – Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia – all stayed the same from 2020 to 2025.

At the same time, though, a few notoriously pro-abortion states also saw decreases in the number of clinics (or have announced shut downs by the summer of this year). Michigan will end up closing six clinics that were open in 2020, New York ten, Minnesota four, Connecticut two, and Alaska and Nevada one.

Some of these, of course, are now supplemented by virtual clinics ready to “pick up the slack” and offer services such as abortion that used to be available from clinics with physical locations. This is a clear sign that at least some affiliates are dealing with other issues such as management, staffing, budget or a dwindling customer base.

The numbers in a few states are complicated to interpret, perhaps because they initially sought to protect the unborn but saw those protections overturned by court decisions or referendums. For example, while Ohio saw its overall number of clinics drop by one, it added two new virtual clinics and actually added surgical and chemical abortion services to at least one clinic since 2020.

If one disregards the virtual clinics, only a handful of states actually added physical clinics between 2020 and 2025. They are Arkansas, California, Delaware, and Virginia. Arkansas, Delaware, and Virginia all added just one new brick-and-mortar site, though only the new clinics in Delaware and Virginia offered abortion.

Three of the four clinics California officially added were virtual, but the number of clinics in that state offering abortions rose by 14, a clear sign of abortion expansion. Most were clinics simply adding chemical abortion to their offerings, but there were two new surgical facilities added to California’s clinic list in 2025.

Several others similarly kept their clinic numbers largely the same, but increased their number of abortion-performing clinics, usually by the addition of chemical abortions.

Maryland and Maine both added chemical abortions to four clinics. Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington added three. Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Virginia added two. Kansas, New York, and Vermont added one. (Some of these involved the addition of a virtual clinic offering abortion pills.)

What these changes mean

All these changes together point not to an organization shutting down after Roe’s fall, but one adjusting to the new post-Dobbs reality.

The data appear to show Planned Parenthood keeping its abortion business going in two ways: (1) by keeping most old clinics in pro-life states open as travel agencies to send women to clinics in other states; and (2) by emphasizing chemical abortions, which require minimal staffing and facilities.

Planned Parenthood affiliates have expanded operations in states where abortion is still legal to handle more cases, especially at large centers near the border. Others have added customers by adding virtual clinics, prescribing abortion pills by webcam or phone and shipping pills to women’s homes so they never have to come to the clinic.

Though they continue to pursue legal challenges, Planned Parenthood does not appear to be performing abortions in states with the new protections. They will instead try and do what the law allows: send women to clinics in other states like California, Colorado, and Illinois, where there are no practical limits.

The rise of telemedicine that came with COVID and the ascendancy of abortion pills presented Planned Parenthood with both a challenge and an opportunity.

Women did not want to come into an old, dirty storefront clinic if they didn’t have to, and some of Planned Parenthood’s older clinics shuttered during the pandemic. But others adjusted and shifted some of their clients to virtual clinics, aided enormously by Biden-era deregulation of chemical abortion.

These new watered-down “safeguards” from Biden’s FDA authorized screening and prescription to be done online or by phone and allow pills to be mailed to women’s homes or made available for pickup from their local drugstore.

Many of the clinics that remain are large, modern mega-clinics, capable of handling large numbers of patients and hosting a busy virtual hub. So there may be fewer clinics overall and fewer low-level clinicians. This leaves a limited number of surgically trained abortionists to handle the later (more profitable) surgical cases at the bigger clinics and a handful of tech-savvy certified chemical abortionists to manage a lot of the virtual contacts.

There are overworked, underpaid staffers at the other clinics not happy with this top-heavy arrangement, but the organization considers it essential to Planned Parenthood’s ability to operate (NY Times 2/15/25).