While the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s one-year Medicaid moratorium may deal a significant blow to big abortion providers, it would be a mistake not to point out that Planned Parenthood (i.e., the nation’s largest abortion provider) has been in a steady state of decline for decades. The defund provision could hit the corporation’s finances hard — but Planned Parenthood was digging its own grave long before Congress penned the BBB.
As the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made its way to the House floor in May 2025, Planned Parenthood Federation of America stated that a federal defund would “put 200 health centers at risk of closure.” From May to July, PPFA was on the offensive, lobbying politicians, curating messaging to garner public sympathy, and scrambling to “rush” donations from donors in the face of a possible federal defund.
To capitalize on the political moment, PPFA closed a Cleveland clinic in late May 2025 as final votes on the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act drew nearer to a close. PPFA ambiguously cited severed federal funds as the cause of the clinic’s closure, but the BBB had not been signed into law. The Cleveland clinic was on the rocks, and its closure was politically efficacious.
What better time to solicit donations and beg for public support than in the face of a federal defund?
The Cleveland closure is not an unusual circumstance for Planned Parenthood — the first mark of PPFA’s pre-BBB decline was a consistent annual swath of clinic closures.
From January 2022 to May 2025, 66 Planned Parenthood locations closed in the United States. In February 2025, the New York Times reported that “Planned Parenthood’s health care operation has shrunk from a high of five million patients served across 900 clinics in the 1990s to 2.1 million patients and 600 clinics today.”
Planned Parenthood is clearly not the giant it used to be.
