Category Archives: women’s health

Planned Parenthood

Cecil Richards

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Today Richards oversees a federation with more than 10,000 employees at 700 Planned Parenthood centers across the country. (She also helms their Action Fund.) Even in the face of deep state and federal funding cuts, the organization remains one of the largest reproductive health care providers in the nation. Abortion services constitute 3 percent of the care it provides—meaning that, yes, Planned Parenthood is where roughly 300,000 women will choose to terminate a pregnancy in any given year, often because it is the only place in their state they can do so. But those same health centers also administer more than 10 million medical services yearly—the majority to women and teenagers living in rural or medically underserved areas. That includes 4.5 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, and nearly a million screenings for breast and cervical cancer. One in every five women has visited a Planned Parenthood in her lifetime; a full 10 percent of patients are men.