Ezra Klein: About that chart

washingtonpost.com

Charlotte Allen says it’s misleading:

One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test — a separate service in Planned Parenthood’s reckoning — and is almost always followed at the organization’s clinics by a “going home” packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs — you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.

I’ve asked Planned Parenthood if they have any disagreement with Allen’s analysis. If they do, I’ll update the post.

Update: Tait Sye, spokesman for Planned Parenthood, e-mails: “I would say the chart is intended to capture the breadth of care we provide. We are very transparent in what the chart represents, and the number of women who come to PP for care. I don’t know how they get 1 in 3, but if you want to follow their mathematical logic, you would take number of patients and divide by number of abortions. So, about 1 in 10 women who come to PP, come for abortion care (assuming a woman does not come for a 2nd abortion). 3 million women/ 329,000 abortions.”