The National Catholic Register portal reports that Planned Parenthood performed 434,450 abortions in 2023-2024, an all-time high representing an 8% increase from the previous year, while simultaneously receiving over $830 million in taxpayer funding. The article presents the reactions of various “pro-life” advocates who call for the permanent defunding of the organization, while noting that other health services provided by the group have declined over the past decade. That a Catholic news outlet frames the mass slaughter of innocents primarily as a question of federal budget appropriations and telehealth policy — rather than as a diabolical crime against God’s Law demanding the full restoration of Catholic social order — reveals the profound spiritual bankruptcy of the post-conciliar Catholic “pro-life” movement, which has reduced a supernatural battle against the culture of death to a sterile legislative lobbying exercise within a system that is itself constitutionally ordered against Christ the King.
The Numbers of Hell: What 434,450 Abortions Truly Mean
The statistic is staggering: 434,450 unborn children slaughtered in a single year by one organization alone. This figure does not include telehealth chemical abortions, which are described as “a growing percentage of all abortions.” The Charlotte Lozier Institute scholar Michael New notes that over the past decade, Planned Parenthood’s abortions have increased by over 34%, while cancer screenings fell by more than 42% and prenatal services declined by more than 55%. The trajectory is unmistakable: Planned Parenthood is not a health care provider that happens to perform abortions — it is an abortion business that has systematically shed every pretense of genuine medical care.
The article states: “During the past 10 years, the number of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood has increased by over 34%. Meanwhile, cancer screenings fell by more than 42% and prenatal services declined by more than 55% during the same time time period.”
This is not a statistical curiosity. This is the logical endpoint of the contraceptive-abortion mentality that the Catholic Church alone had the authority and the courage to condemn without equivocation. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical *Casti Connubii* (1930), taught infallibly that direct abortion is a grave crime against God’s Law, and that no human authority — no state, no court, no legislature — can ever legalize or legitimize what God has condemned. The modernist conciliar sect, through its embrace of religious liberty (*Dignitatis Humanae*, 1965) and its effective silence on the intrinsic evil of abortion in practice, has created the very conditions in which an organization like Planned Parenthood can flourish, receive public funding, and be treated as merely a “policy disagreement” rather than an engine of mass murder that must be shut down by the full authority of the Catholic state.
The Defunding Illusion: Political Lobbying in Place of Catholic Action
The article’s central framing is revealing in its poverty. The “pro-life” advocates quoted — Michael New, Tessa Cox, Dr. Christina Francis, Noah Brandt of Live Action — all frame the response to mass abortion in terms of federal budget appropriations, Medicaid reimbursements, and congressional legislation. Noah Brandt says: “Congress needs to extend the defund and make it permanent to shut down the flow of public dollars to an organization that’s killing nearly half a million American children every year.”
Michael New states: “Pro-lifers should encourage President Trump and congressional Republicans to pass a 2027 budget that prevents Planned Parenthood from receiving federal Medicaid dollars.”
This is the language of political lobbying, not of Catholic civilization. It reveals a movement that has entirely capitulated to the liberal framework — the framework condemned by Pope Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors*, which anathematized the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The “pro-life” movement described in this article operates entirely within the assumptions of the liberal democratic order: that the proper response to mass murder is to adjust line items in a federal budget, to lobby elected representatives, to hope that the right coalition gains power in Congress.
Pope Pius XI, in *Quas Primas* (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to remind the world that Christ’s authority extends over all nations, all governments, and all aspects of public life. He taught: “The State is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” And further: “Rulers of states therefore [should] not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.”
The article is entirely silent on this. There is no mention of the Social Kingship of Christ. There is no mention of the duty of the Catholic state to outlaw abortion as a capital crime against God’s Law. There is no mention of the teaching of Pope Pius IX in *Apostolicae Sedis* (1869), which imposed automatic excommunication reserved to the Holy See for the crime of abortion. The article treats abortion as a “policy issue” to be debated in Congress, rather than as a diabolical evil that demands the full coercive power of the Catholic state to suppress.
The Omission of Supernatural Reality
Perhaps the most damning feature of this article is what it does not say. There is no mention of the state of grace. There is no mention of mortal sin. There is no mention of the eternal damnation that awaits those who procure or perform abortions. There is no mention of the sacraments — of the necessity of confession, of true contrition, of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered for the souls of the innocent victims and for the conversion of their killers. There is no mention of the Last Judgment, where Christ shall render to each according to His works (Matthew 25:31-40).
Pope St. Pius X, in *Lamentabili Sane Exitu* (1907), condemned the modernist proposition that “the Church, in condemning errors, has no right to require any internal assent from the faithful to the pronouncements issued by the Church” (Proposition 7). The article’s silence on the supernatural consequences of abortion — the eternal fate of souls — is a practical manifestation of this condemned error. It treats the destruction of 434,450 human beings as a temporal, political problem, stripping it of its eternal dimension.
The article quotes Dr. Christina Francis: “The pro-life movement has two battles: fighting the anti-motherhood narrative that’s infected American society and the abortion pill epidemic flooding the internet thanks to the Biden administration’s reckless policies and the Trump administration’s unwillingness to restore safeguards for abortion drugs.”
This statement reduces the fight against abortion to a narrative battle and a regulatory question about pharmaceutical safeguards. It is the language of the culture war, not of the Faith. Where is the call to prayer? Where is the call to penance? Where is the call to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the terror of demons, through the Holy Rosary? Where is the call to the Most Blessed Sacrament, exposed in perpetual adoration, as the only true remedy for the sins of the nation? The article is as spiritually barren as the modernist structures that produced the crisis it describes.
The $830 Million Question: Taxpayer-Funded Murder
The article notes that Planned Parenthood received over $830 million in government grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements in 2023-2024 — a 50% increase from 2014. Michael New observes that “Planned Parenthood is heavily dependent on taxpayer funding” and notes that approximately 50 Planned Parenthood facilities ceased operations after being made ineligible for federal Medicaid money.
The Catholic teaching on this matter is unambiguous. Pope Leo XIII, in *Immortale Dei* (1885), taught that the civil power is ordained by God and must direct its actions to the common good, which is understood in light of the natural law and ultimately the divine law. To use public funds — extracted from citizens under penalty of law — to finance an organization whose primary activity is the destruction of innocent human life is not merely bad policy; it is a profound act of injustice that cries out to heaven for vengeance (Genesis 4:10).
The article’s suggestion that the solution lies in “permanent defunding” through congressional action ignores a deeper truth: a Catholic state would not merely “defund” Planned Parenthood — it would outlaw the organization entirely, confiscate its assets, and prosecute its operators for murder. The Code of Canon Law of 1917, Canon 2350 §1, imposed automatic excommunication on those who procured abortion, and the civil law of Catholic Christendom historically treated it as a capital offense. The article’s tame political framing is a scandal to the memory of the martyrs who died rather than submit to the murder of innocents.
The Decline of “Services” and the Exposure of the Lie
The article documents a decade-long trend: as abortions increase, genuine health services decline. Tessa Cox notes that “over the past decade, abortions, government funding, and total revenue soared, even as the number of clients served has declined and total services have stagnated.”
This demolishes the perennial defense of Planned Parenthood — that it provides essential health care to underserved communities. The organization has been exposed, by its own annual report, as an abortion-first enterprise that systematically eliminates the very services it uses as political cover. Cox adds that “women deserve better alternatives,” noting that these alternatives “outnumber Planned Parenthoods by 15 to 1 nationwide.”
This is true, but it is incomplete. The ultimate “better alternative” is not merely a different community health clinic — it is the restoration of Catholic civilization, in which the sanctity of life is enshrined in law, in which the family is protected by the sacramental grace of matrimony, in which the Blessed Virgin Mary is honored as Queen of the family and of the nation, and in which the culture of death has no foothold because the culture of Christ the King is total.
The Telehealth Abortion Crisis and the Limits of Legislation
Michael New acknowledges a critical point: “That said, cutting funding to Planned Parenthood may not have a large impact on the incidence of abortion in the short term due to the increasing prevalence of telehealth abortions.”
This admission exposes the fundamental inadequacy of the political approach. As long as the American constitutional order remains what it is — a godless, liberal democratic regime founded on the “right” to privacy and the “separation” of Church and State — no amount of legislative maneuvering will eradicate abortion. The chemical abortion pill, distributed through the mail and across state borders, has rendered state-level restrictions increasingly ineffective. The only true solution is the one that the post-conciliar Catholic establishment refuses to articulate: the conversion of the United States to the Catholic Faith and the establishment of Christ the King’s Social Reign, in which the civil law is conformed to the divine law and the murder of the innocent is treated as the supreme crime against God and society.
Conclusion: The Bankruptcy of Post-Conciliar “Pro-Life” Activism
This National Catholic Register article is a perfect specimen of the spiritual and intellectual poverty of the post-conciliar “pro-life” movement. It documents a record number of abortions with appropriate horror, but it cannot transcend the liberal political framework that makes such horrors possible. It calls for defunding, not for the conversion of nations. It speaks of congressional budgets, not of the Last Judgment. It quotes political lobbyists, not the Fathers of the Church.
Pope St. Pius X warned in *Pascendi Dominici Gregis* (1907) that the modernist error consists in reducing the supernatural to the natural, the divine to the human, and the eternal to the temporal. This article does precisely that. It takes the greatest crime of the modern age — the systematic slaughter of millions of innocent children — and reduces it to a question of Medicaid reimbursement rates and federal appropriations bills.
The faithful who seek to combat the culture of death must reject this impoverished framework entirely. They must return to the integral Catholic teaching on the Social Kingship of Christ, on the duty of the state to suppress public crimes against God’s Law, on the necessity of the sacraments and of true interior conversion, and on the absolute primacy of the supernatural order over the political. Until the Catholic world recovers this vision, the slaughter will continue, and the “pro-life” movement will continue to lobby for budget adjustments while the blood of innocents flows like a river through the streets of Sodom.
Source:
Activists Renew Defunding Drive After Planned Parenthood Reports Record-Breaking Year of Abortions (ncregister.com)
Date: 09.04.2026