About that three percent...

Since the brouhaha in Aurora, Planned Parenthood has been whining that "only 3%" of its "services" are abortions. And some critics have pondered, "Three precent counted how? Three precent of expenditures? Three precent of clients? Three precent of billable items? I've suspected the latter.

And now (Cue drum roll.), from Charlotte Allen of the Weekly Standard:

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.

Way to go, PP. Screwtape chuckles at the marvel of his handiwork.