MacKenzie Scott — the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — gave a record-breaking $275 million to Planned Parenthood.
With a net worth of over $55 billion that arose from her divorce from Bezos in 2019, Scott has given away billions to various nonprofit organizations. A statement from Planned Parenthood Federation of America thanked Scott for her donation, which benefits the abortion giant’s national offices and 21 of its affiliates.
“We are incredibly grateful for Ms. Scott’s extraordinary philanthropic investment in Planned Parenthood, as a critical part of the public health infrastructure,” Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said. “There is no question that we are living through a crisis for sexual and reproductive health and rights in this country. As we face the most serious attacks on access to reproductive health care that we’ve seen in a generation, we know this moment requires us to be innovative and to double down on our efforts to ensure everyone has equitable access to health care, including abortion.”
Johnson specified that the funding will help to eliminate “racial and structural barriers” — specifically for black women, who would be the most “hurt” by legislation heightening restrictions on abortion.
In a Medium post explaining her donation to Planned Parenthood and dozens of other organizations, Scott emphasized “the cause of equity” as a motivation for her giving.
“It’s easy to think of different groups struggling within the same systems as not only separate, but also opposing,” she wrote. “Yet when we help one group, we often help them all… The dividends of changes in attitude each time disparate groups help each other are harder to trace. But the trend line is clear. Communities with a habit of removing obstacles for different subsets of people tend to get better for everyone.”
Planned Parenthood completed 354,871 “abortion procedures” in 2020, according to the organization’s 2020 annual report. The figure amounts to 972 abortions per day and 41 abortions per hour across the United States. Planned Parenthood, based on those statistics, carries out an abortion every ninety seconds.
Though America’s 862,000 annual abortions represent the leading cause of death in the United States, Planned Parenthood’s abortions alone would represent the third-leading cause of death, followed by COVID-19, accidental deaths, respiratory disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease as of 2020.
Planned Parenthood also reported that taxpayer dollars accounted for $618.1 million of Planned Parenthood’s $1.641 billion in revenues — in other words, federal funds accounted for nearly 38% of the organization’s income.
Scott’s donation occurs as the Supreme Court considers arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which pertains to a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation. As the Justices prepare to release their verdict, a growing number of lawmakers across the country are filing bills to abolish abortion rather than regulating it through heartbeat acts and cutoffs at various gestational ages.
Texas State Rep. Bryan Slaton (R-TX), for example, introduced a bill that would “ensure the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all unborn children from the moment of fertilization.” In an interview last year, Slaton told The Daily Wire that “to end the outright murder of innocent children, states must be willing to stand up and ban it with or without the Court’s permission.”