Telehealth Abortion: The Streaming Porn of “Family Planning”
Earlier this month, new #WeCount abortion estimates were published for the first half of 2025. With barely contained glee, they reported that more U.S. abortions were performed in January 2025 than in any single month since their tracking began (in April 2022). That led them to publish the following neener, neener headline: “Abortions in the US have increased since Dobbs.” I can almost hear their smug self-satisfaction. Who is the “they” behind the #WeCount numbers? That would be the perversely-named Society of Family Planning. I say that because “family planning“ organizations seem to all have the same plan. Namely, the elimination of family—through birth control and abortion. God says to be fruitful and multiply. The family planning business much prefers sterility. And though that may seem a foolish longterm strategy, I’ve noticed that the devil isn’t overly concerned with human longevity.
If you feel I’ve overstated the case, the Society of Family Planning is helmed by 15 women and one man. There is a personal bio for each of the 16 board members. Only one of them appears to be married. Only two appear to have children. That would be April Lockley, a New York abortionist who identifies herself as a mom that wants to “liberate abortion training and care from white supremacy” and Rana Barar who says that what she loves best in life is “traveling with her husband and young adult children” and “talking about abortion.” That’s not a joke. The only man on the board is Bhavik Kumar. “As a gay man of color,” his bio reads, “Dr. Kumar works to highlight the intersections of queer and reproductive rights.” In addition to being a traveling abortionist, he is also described as “an outspoken advocate for trans care.” So, that’s the male voice in the group.
I’ll grant that it’s possible there are others on the board who are married or have children, but if you direct a family planning organization and make no mention of your own family in your personal bio, that tells me everything I need to know about the value you place on marriage and children. But I suspect these really are just mostly single, childless women who have dedicated their lives to keeping other women as childless as they are. Additional board members include Kate Shaw, who is working to decrease barriers to 2nd-trimester abortions, and Alisa Goldberg, who says that mentoring abortionists “brings her much professional joy.” It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that anyone who is in the business of planning families should have a family of their own. But that, apparently, is not how the Society of Family Planning operates. They’re like financial planners who’ve never bothered to do any saving or investing of their own but still deem themselves qualified to manage your finances. Actually, here’s a better way of putting it. They’re like financial planners whose sole purpose is to leave you bankrupt. Seems a little counterintuitive, no?
The Society of Family Planning, on their prominently-featured DEI page, explicitly condemns “institutionalized, exclusionary, and oppressive systems such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, nationalism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, and other discriminatory practices” that limit “the full participation of all contributors to the field of family planning.” They also humbly “acknowledge the interconnectedness of these oppressive systems.” But despite checking every nonsensical box in their supposed commitment to diversity—and ensuring that all 16 board members dutifully list their personal pronouns, you’ll notice that there are no heterosexual men on the board and no one who has any ethical qualms about abortion. Theirs is the kind of diversity which requires everyone to believe the same thing.
Whenever you come across an organization led by 15 mostly-single and mostly-childless women (and one gay man), you may want to keep a wary eye. Because while men are prone to corruption, women are prone to being deceived. At least that’s the argument Paul made in explaining his refusal to allow women to preach. “Adam was not deceived,” he wrote to Timothy, “but the woman was deceived.” That’s not to say Adam was any better. His sin was worse for his not having been deceived, and he is held primarily responsible for the fall. But that doesn’t change the fact that Eve is the one the serpent got to. She is the one who took his lies to heart. Adam is the one who took the path of least resistance. Eve forsook the truth; Adam forsook his post.
Though this is admittedly speculative, Paul seems to further imply that childless women are susceptible to being deceived in ways that mothers are not. “The woman was deceived and became a transgressor,” Paul continued in his letter to Timothy, “yet she will be saved through childbearing.” Though he’s talking specifically about Eve, his assertion seems to encompass all women—since it took generations of births to finally reach the birth of our promised Savior. And Paul’s use of the future continuous tense (will be saved) indicates an application that is ongoing—as if the bearing of children itself has a salvific effect in the lives of women. It could be that in giving them a proper outlet for their motherly instincts and a proper object for their devotion, children thereby provide a measure of inoculation against the standard litany of cultural lies. Perhaps if more of the women running the Society of Family Planning had families of their own, they would be less obsessed with planning the families of everyone else. But as it is, they have mostly forsaken the bearing of offspring and are doing their damndest to insist that others do the same.
For all these reasons, I am skeptical of the numbers published by The Society of Family Planning. Their love for abortion is too great, and the interests of their board are too narrow. Like Guttmacher, they fancy themselves objective researchers, but their baseline commitment is to abortion—not to truth. If anyone epitomizes the end justifying the means, it is those who have dedicated their lives to promoting this vile practice. Guttmacher reported in early 2024that an estimated 1.03 million U.S. abortions took place in 2023, but when the actual counts came in (from states that actually bother to count), Guttmacher’s estimates turned out to be 14% too high. Based on the actual abortion totals for the 46 states (+DC) that record and publish them (along with Guttmacher’s and #WeCount’s own estimates for the four that don’t), an estimated 888,000 U.S. abortions took place in 2023–down from 913,000 in 2022, and 974,000 in 2021. Meanwhile, #WeCount’s 2023 abortion total was even higher than Guttmacher’s at 1.06 million—an overage of 18%.
Having spent decades insisting that outlawing abortion would not reduce a woman’s willingness to choose abortion, I suppose it’s only natural for the abortion industry to pad its numbers in the aftermath of Roe. As to any presumption of institutional integrity, allow me to remind you what industry these institutions represent. Anyone who is willing to celebrate the mass execution of the most innocent and helpless members of the human community may also be willing to fudge the data. It’s not as if their moral compass points north. But the abortion increases #WeCount claimed in 2023 were as child’s play compared to the increases they’re claiming for 2024 and 2025. And it all owes to a terrible new talisman that’s become the centerpiece of their abortion toolkit. In the world of data collection, it’s a magic bullet. It operates almost entirely outside the law and can neither be checked nor verified. What do they call it? Telehealth abortion.
Until recently, whether a mother chose to kill her unborn child surgically or medically, the process had to occur—or at least begin—at a physical abortion clinic. In the case of medication abortion, the first round of drugs was taken at the clinic. The second round was taken at home. But with telehealth, in which abortion pills are mailed directly to the aborting mother, the era of virtual abortion clinics has officially begun. That is very bad news. Abortion clinics are as insidious a destination as any place on the planet. Truly, and yet virtual abortion clinics are even worse. Because they remove what may be the last practical obstacle to abortion: the shame of having to drive to an abortion clinic and walk through its doors. Sadly, we’ve seen this film before.
When a man had to actually visit a strip club or walk into an x-rated bookstore to illicitly view a naked woman, the buy-in was high enough to keep most men from suffering the degradation. But when porn went virtual, the pragmatic obstacles fell away and our true character was revealed. At least to ourselves. Essentially, there are only four things that might keep a man from viewing pornography: Moral conviction. Reputational concern. Physical cost. And the lack of opportunity. I suppose lack of desire might be a fifth, but that strikes me as rather hypothetical—even amongst men with an active sex life. For red-blooded males in general, in the absence of a beautiful and accommodating wife, it comes down to these four. And these are the same four things that might keep a woman from having an abortion. In fact, these are the same four things that might keep any person from any longed-for vice. It would be great if moral conviction was enough, but that is often not the case—which is why the other three bulwarks are so valuable. It is good when sinful behavior results in public shame. It is goodwhen sinful behavior has a physical cost, and it is good when sinful behavior is not easily accessible. Because all of these things act as restraints for those who lack the conviction to restrain themselves. I’ve noticed it’s quite easy to condemn the moral failings of celebrities, without considering that we may well have done the same—if we’d only been afforded the opportunity. What a mercy it is to be spared from the temptations that regularly buffet the rich and the famous.
The threat that telehealth abortion poses to all that is good and beautiful is twofold. First, it removes the inherent shame of having to enter an abortion clinic while catering to the emerging class of agoraphobes who won’t even deign to pick up their own takeout. Second, and this is the one that has #WeCount in such raptures, telehealth abortion has the potential to entirely circumvent the law. When you kill someone, it turns out, you don’t want an audience. And when you kill someone illegally, you really don’t want an audience. Telehealth abortion manages to accommodates both of these objectives—which is what makes it so damnable and dangerous. How dangerous? Let’s take a look at some of #WeCount’s published numbers—starting at the beginning. That would be Alabama. By the grace of God, it is no longer permitted to poison or dismember unborn children in the Heart of Dixie. By law, an “abortion shall only be permitted if an attending physician licensed in Alabama determines that an abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child’s mother.” In 2024, the Alabama Department of Public Health reports that only three abortions took place within the state. What was #WeCount’s abortion estimate for Alabama in 2024? That would be 5,640. According to the Society of Family Planning, every one of these abortions was performed via telehealth and every one took place within the “formal healthcare system.” One could argue, of course, that if these abortions actually had occurred within the healthcare system, they would have been included in the state health department statistics. But they’re not. Because of some vague and opaque shield laws, so says the Society of Family Planning, it is legal for these abortions to take place even in states where abortion is illegal. How do we know their numbers are accurate? We don’t.
Here’s what we do know. The Society of Family Planning pays its participating abortion clinics for the data they provide. How much? That’s not disclosed. Do they give more money to clinics that report more abortions? Again, we don’t know. The Society also concedes that for their 2025 numbers, “28% of abortions were imputed.” That means more than a quarter of the abortions #WeCount reported were not counts. They were guesses. And because of that, the Society suggests that their abortion counts are likely too low. And these “counts,” they’re careful to remind us, “do not include abortions that take place in the US outside of the formal healthcare system.” Implying, again, that telehealth abortions do take place within the formal healthcare system. In Texas, another state where abortion is illegal with few exceptions, there were 78 reported abortions in 2024. But according to #WeCount, there were actually 35,960 abortions in Texas that year. In Florida, where abortion is banned after six weeks, the state health department reports that an average of 3,698 abortions occurred each month in 2025. #WeCount put that number at 6,137 per month.
You see the problem. #WeCount is publishing seemingly outlandish abortion totals that cannot be independently verified. So, I have no idea whether Texas’ 2024 abortion total was closer to 80 or closer to 36,000. The discrepancies are huge, and here’s one more thing that leads me to regard that #WeCounts abortion totals as something less than veracious. When abortion is outlawed, fewer abortions take place. Both history and common sense unequivocally bear this out. In May of 2022, the month before abortion was outlawed in Alabama, #WeCount estimated that 620 abortions occurred within the state. But in June, 2025, the most recent month with published data, #WeCount put the number at 800. We see something similar in Louisiana. In May, 2022, #WeCount says 380 abortions occurred within the state. In June of 2025, after abortion had been banned in Louisiana, they put the total at 940.
What #WeCount’s 2025 numbers essentially require you to believe is that women are morelikely to get an abortion when it’s against the law than they are when it’s not. Since that is entirely implausible, one of three things is happening. Either the Society of Family Planning is manufacturing their numbers out of whole cloth (for the good of the cause!), or something has happened culturally or economically to dramatically increase the demand of abortion, or the ease of obtaining a telehealth abortion—and the states’ inability to punish those who break the law by doing so—has served to make abortion more accessible rather than less. It’s also possible that the real culprit is some combination of all three. I should also point out that virtual abortion clinics don’t provide any sort of follow up. They send out the poisoned pills but have no idea if they were actually taken. In other words, #WeCount is purportedly counting the number of abortion pills that were sent out—not the number of babies that were killed.
“In the first half of 2025,” #WeCount tells us, “27% of all abortions within the US healthcare system were provided via telehealth.” We know these abortions weren’t provided within the U.S. healthcare system in any true sense of the term. But if they were performed at all, this is a devastating development. And if they weren’t performed—or at least not at the levels reported, the threat still looms. Because the cheaper and easier and more anonymous it is to have an abortion, the more abortions will be had. Such is the nature of sin. And while the closing of abortion clinics, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and the outright outlawing of abortion are all things to celebrate, it won’t matter much if virtual abortion clinics become the norm and states prove incapable of enforcing their bans. Unless, that is, we’re able to come at it another way.
Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. That’s the counsel King David offered in Psalm 37. And because David delighted in the Lord, God gave him the desire of his heart. Namely, Bathsheba. Except that’s entirely backwards. The fact that David desired Bathsheba is evidence that he wasn’t delighting himself in the Lord. Delighting in the Lord doesn’t sanctify sinful desires. It destroys and replaces them. Which is to say, the law—including the condemnation of adultery—is just as likely to arouse rebellion as obedience. Just laws are infinitely better than the alternative, but they’re still incapable of reforming the heart. It is only when we are renewed from within that external constraints become superfluous.
The law cannot solve ultimate problems. And neither can a website. But what a website can do is to shine the light of knowledge and revelation upon the darkness of abortion. For when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. Combatting abortion at the heart level is even more important when the external barriers fail and sin is right there for the taking. Public protests and the petitioning of politicians are good things, but they are not ultimate things. They cannot hold the line when abortion is free and easy and anonymous. So the task of Abort73 is much the same as it’s ever been. It’s not primarily to change the law. It’s primarily to change the way people think. Because the surest way to destroy sin is to destroy the appetite for sin, and the surest way to destroy the appetite for abortion is to expose it for all the world to see.