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\n Photo: J. Scott Applewhite\/AP Photo\n <\/p>\n
This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you need an abortion in New York City, you probably think you\u2019re lucky: You live in one of the easiest places to get one in America. Though terminating a pregnancy has been outlawed or drastically restricted in 20 states since Roe v. Wade fell in 2022<\/a>, it\u2019s legal in New York through the 24th week with liberal exceptions after that. If you\u2019re on Medicaid, the procedure or pills can be covered. You likely want to go to Planned Parenthood, where you won\u2019t be judged. You might know the clinic on Bleecker Street, in the orange brick Classic Revival building featured, for years, in countless articles \u2014 a location that has trained generations of abortion providers. But that clinic, Manhattan\u2019s only Planned Parenthood, shuttered permanently on Halloween.<\/p>\n The year before, in the summer of 2024, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, the affiliate that ran the Manhattan clinic, had closed down three clinics upstate and one on Staten Island. That August, Bleecker Street stopped offering abortions after 20 weeks \u2014 a rare but sometimes needed procedure (in 2022, accounting for a little more than 2 percent of abortions in the city) \u2014 because it couldn\u2019t afford an anesthesiologist for the deep sedation the clinic considered necessary. The patients who could still get abortions might remain awake during their procedures; you couldn\u2019t know how much the nurses hated telling them that. Then, last January, the building\u2019s boiler broke, after decades of deferred upkeep, and the clinic closed for 20 days. When it reopened, it stopped abortion procedures entirely, though it still provided the pills. In March, the building went up for sale for $39 million.<\/p>\n Now, with Manhattan closed, a New Yorker could go to one of the remaining Planned Parenthood clinics, one each in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. There are also, in Manhattan, a few independent clinics and the city\u2019s public hospitals and sexual-health centers, which have ramped up provision since the fall of Roe. Some private hospitals and doctors\u2019 offices also offer abortions, if you know where to look. But Planned Parenthood is the best known and most trusted \u2014 the leading provider of sexual-health services and abortions in the country. In 2022, almost one-fourth of all abortions in the city were performed by a Planned Parenthood clinic. More than one in six was at Bleecker Street. Yet PPGNY says it couldn\u2019t afford to keep the clinic open.<\/p>\n The problem was bigger than New York. Planned Parenthood\u2019s brick-and-mortar locations have been disappearing across the country for years. Over the past two decades, the total has dropped from more than 800 clinics to around 550, and Manhattan was only one of roughly 50 that closed in 2025. They\u2019ve shuttered in red states, yes \u2014 including Texas, Indiana, and Louisiana, where abortion has been largely illegal since 2022 \u2014 but also in blue ones, such as Minnesota, Colorado, and Vermont, where it\u2019s robustly protected.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a shocking turn for an organization that, however embattled by the right, has been powerful and broadly popular for decades \u2014 a fixture of the health-care system for half a century and a key player in the country\u2019s politics since the 1990s. Over the years, pollsters have asked people how they feel about the organization compared to other cultural institutions, to national figures, and even to public sentiment \u2014 to the political parties, for example, to the AARP, to former presidents, to the phrase \u201cAll Lives Matter.\u201d Planned Parenthood has consistently ranked among the top. This may be because a huge number of people have visited its clinics. A report published in May said that one in three women surveyed had gotten care at a Planned Parenthood, and a poll from January 2024 found that half of all women in the U.S., and a third of all men, said they knew someone who had been helped by the organization.<\/p>\n But for years it\u2019s been facing a funding crisis across its complex structure: a national operation, with a political advocacy arm, that oversees but does not fully control 46 regional affiliates, each managing a varying number of clinics. Providing health care to low-income people has never been easy, but in recent years, rising costs have outpaced revenue, especially reimbursements from private and public insurance. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court\u2019s decision to strike down Roe, private donations surged almost 50 percent, but they returned to normal levels by the next year.<\/p>\n In the first few months of Trump\u2019s second term, Planned Parenthood took some significant blows. Some affiliates were locked out of government funding for family planning and preventative health care for allegedly violating the president\u2019s executive order prohibiting the use of federal money to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Others, including PPGNY, were told they couldn\u2019t use federal grants for teen-pregnancy-prevention programs unless they promised to comply with Trump\u2019s executive orders on DEI and \u201cgender ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, this past July, through Trump\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act<\/a>, the right achieved its long-pursued dream of cutting Planned Parenthood off from the majority of its federal funds, effectively stripping the organization of Medicaid money \u2014 an estimated $700 million \u2014 for a year. This time, conservatives not only controlled all three levers of government; they also had fewer moderates, such as Senator John McCain, whose thumbs-down vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act had circumvented Planned Parenthood\u2019s defunding during the first Trump administration. And though Planned Parenthood warned that the bill put as many as 200 clinics at risk of closing, the public response from its allies was far quieter than it had been in the past: They were exhausted, overwhelmed, and a bit disillusioned. The millions of dollars Planned Parenthood had spent lobbying over the past few decades had failed to protect abortion nationally, and Roe had been lost.<\/p>\n At the same time, the organization was seen by many in the abortion-rights movement as less relevant than it had been in the past. They believed it was overly cautious \u2014 it had resisted sending medication abortion to ban states as other groups had ramped up provision \u2014 and a trail of seemingly self-interested choices had infuriated allies to its left, leaving it with fewer defenders in its time of need. For years, since long before the second Trump administration, grassroots operations and leaders in abortion rights had accused Planned Parenthood of compromising the movement, its own core mission, and public trust \u2014 all for the sake of maintaining political power. It had continued to support politicians that failed to prioritize abortion rights, preemptively complied with hostile laws, and declined to fight them when they passed \u2014 even, in some cases, refusing to provide abortions in inhospitable areas when it was still legal to do so.<\/p>\n These complaints persist among key grassroots players, abortion practitioners, and activist lawyers, who tell me that Planned Parenthood has become more a barrier to their work than a partner. Planned Parenthood officials, meanwhile, have long defended the organization\u2019s decisions, saying they\u2019ve been necessary for keeping the doors open.<\/p>\n Though Planned Parenthood affiliates operate with a degree of independence, several critics blame the national organization\u2019s leadership for setting the tone. Michele Goodwin, a Georgetown law professor and a former board member for a Southern Californian affiliate, says she wants Planned Parenthood to succeed \u2014 few other groups have the capacity to provide what it does to underserved communities \u2014 but, she tells me, \u201cPlanned Parenthood has a good-girl problem.\u201d The national board especially: \u201cIt\u2019s not wanting to seem to be enraged, bitter, upset, wanting to get along, not upset the cart. They fear speaking more loudly. Let\u2019s just be of soft voice and maybe the members of Congress won\u2019t be mean toward Planned Parenthood. Of course that never worked.\u201d<\/p>\n Alexis McGill Johnson, PPFA\u2019s President and CEO, tells me that so far, since passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the group\u2019s clinics have continued treating Medicaid patients by reaching into donation reserves. In recent months, a handful of blue states, including New York and California, have agreed to pony up funds to make up the difference, but affiliates across the country still face an enormous shortfall \u2014 in the hundreds of millions per year. In September alone, Johnson says, the nationwide cost was around $45 million. \u201cThe reality is that\u2019s not sustainable,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is not a world in which we can continue to meet all of that need.\u201d<\/p>\n Wendy Stark, the CEO of PPGNY, tells me, \u201cWhen I talk to some of my colleagues at Planned Parenthoods around the country, the shared sentiment seems to be that this is the hardest moment that folks have faced in, let\u2019s say, three decades.\u201d Three decades ago, clinics were being bombed. For as formidable as Planned Parenthood has seemed, she says, the organization, and public-health services in general, are deeply vulnerable to the whims of the federal government, even in New York. \u201cNYC still has a relatively robust ecosystem of sexual- and reproductive-health care,\u201d says Stark. \u201cWill we have that in a year? I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n When Margaret Sanger founded the institutions that would eventually become Planned Parenthood in Brooklyn in the 1910s and 1920s, they did not have a \u201cgood girl\u201d problem. They had a stay-out-of-jail problem. Sanger had been radicalized early in life \u2014 watching her mother, an Irish immigrant, give birth to 11 children and suffer at least seven miscarriages \u2014 and later, in her 30s, by her experience, working as a nurse on the Lower East Side, where women begged for help preventing pregnancies. Sanger became a socialist feminist and in 1914 published a magazine, The Woman Rebel, declaring on its front page, \u201cI believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary childrearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.\u201d Sanger was charged with distributing \u201cindecent\u201d materials and, rather than face prosecution, fled to Europe. Ten months later, she returned to stand trial, but her renown and support had grown and the charges were dropped.<\/p>\n In 1916, she opened her first contraception clinic, in Brownsville, with a $50 donation from a fan in California. But Sanger did not support abortion rights and, from the beginning of her public-facing life, took pains to make that clear. Handbills advertising the clinic blared, \u201cDO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT.\u201d Within ten days of its opening, an undercover female cop reported that the clinic was sharing information about contraception, which was barred under federal obscenity laws, and Sanger was arrested. During her 30-day sentence, she taught birth-control methods to her fellow prisoners.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough the 1920s and \u201930s,\u201d wrote one of her biographers, Ellen Chesler, \u201cSanger divorced herself from her radical past \u2026 and made her name virtually synonymous with the birth control cause.\u201d During this period, she enthusiastically supported eugenics, one of the leading progressive crusades of the time, out of some mix of personal interest in limiting the reproduction of those she considered unfit \u2014 which she defined as \u201cMorons, mental defectives, epileptics, illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, and dope fiends\u201d \u2014 and the hope that allying herself with the day\u2019s leading thinkers would make her seem more moderate. (In the racial-justice reckonings of 2020, Sanger\u2019s name was dropped from the Bleecker Street clinic.)<\/p>\n By the end of the 1930s, Sanger lost control of both her clinic and a birth-control organization she\u2019d founded to an upper-crust crowd she disparaged as \u201cdrawing-room lizards.\u201d They preferred the euphemistic term \u201cfamily planning\u201d to \u201cbirth control,\u201d and in 1942, to her distaste, gave their new, unified institution the name Planned Parenthood. By mid-century, it was a respectable bipartisan cause that enjoyed federal funding. Prescott Bush, the Republican politician and patriarch of the Bush family, served as the treasurer of the first nationwide campaign of the organization (though later, when it cost him Catholic votes and election to the U.S. Senate, he regretted his involvement and his family would go on to deny it). When Prescott\u2019s son George H.W. became a congressman, he championed Title X, the legislation that granted federal contraception funding to Planned Parenthood and similar organizations. (H.W. was consequently nicknamed \u201cRubbers.\u201d)<\/p>\n Beginning in 1962, Planned Parenthood\u2019s president Alan Guttmacher supported physician-controlled access to abortion, but the organization had a vexed relationship with the procedure through the early \u201970s. As states started to liberalize their abortion laws, the organization slowly began to provide the procedures \u2014 first at a clinic in Syracuse in 1970. After Roe legalized most abortions nationwide, in 1973, the rise of the Christian right left only a few moderate Republicans wincingly supporting Planned Parenthood. Even George H.W. Bush dropped the organization when he became Ronald Reagan\u2019s running mate in 1980.<\/p>\n Almost immediately after the Supreme Court opened the door to legal abortion, the federal government began inching it back, banning Medicaid funds from covering most abortions in 1976 and, in the years that followed, letting states restrict access by adding hurdles such as mandated counseling and waiting periods. In 1989, Faye Wattleton, Planned Parenthood\u2019s first Black president, formed its national political advocacy arm to begin supporting candidates and legislation. That year, Time magazine wrote that the organization had taken off \u201cthe white gloves\u201d and become \u201cone of the nation\u2019s most vocal and aggressive advocates of abortion rights.\u201d<\/p>\n By the 2010s, defunding Planned Parenthood was at the forefront of the Republican agenda. And under the presidency of Cecile Richards, beginning in 2006, PPFA became even more aligned with the Democratic Party. (Richards was the daughter of former Texas governor Ann Richards and a former chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi.) In 2011, when Republicans retook the House and introduced a budget amendment to deny Planned Parenthood all federal money, House debate was dominated by the question \u2014 Representative Jackie Speier told her abortion story, a first for a member of Congress. The amendment passed in the House but failed in the Senate. During the height of the battle, Richards often emphasized that abortion made up only 3 percent of the services the organization provided.<\/p>\n In 2013, at the start of his second term, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to speak to a Planned Parenthood gala. Some state-level attacks on the organization stuck \u2014 that year, Texas rejected federal funding supporting Planned Parenthood \u2014 but it seemed to be riding high, by far the biggest and most powerful reproductive-rights institution. In 2016, a year when 98 percent of Planned Parenthood\u2019s national PAC dollars went to Democrats, even Trump praised the organization. From the stage of a Republican presidential-primary debate, he echoed the centrist rhetoric pushed by Richards: \u201cMillions of millions of women \u2014 cervical cancer, breast cancer \u2014 are helped by Planned Parenthood,\u201d he said. \u201cI would defund it because I\u2019m pro-life, but millions of women are helped by Planned Parenthood.\u201d<\/p>\n Shortly after his victory that November, according to Richards\u2019s memoir, Richards met with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at Trump\u2019s New Jersey golf course, seeking any friend the organization could find. There, Kushner proposed a deal: Planned Parenthood clinics would be allowed to keep their federal funding under the new administration if they stopped performing abortions. Their federal dollars might even increase. Richards shot down the offer, but Planned Parenthood made it through the first term with its federal funds intact.<\/p>\n Richards stepped down in 2018 and was succeeded by Leana Wen, a physician and former Baltimore health commissioner. (Richards died of brain cancer last January.) According to Wen\u2019s memoir, she won over Planned Parenthood\u2019s hiring committee by pitching that the organization minimize abortion in its messaging even further and reintroduce itself as an apolitical health provider. Staffers revolted, seeing the approach as at once cynical and na\u00efve \u2014 as if the group\u2019s opposition would relent if it only presented itself in the right way.<\/p>\n Wen was ousted in 2019 after less than a year and replaced by Johnson, a longtime national board member. The organization\u2019s second Black president, she would be in charge during the toughest stretch for Planned Parenthood in a century.<\/p>\n \n Women and children outside the Sanger Clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. The Bleecker Street building was still technically open when I visited in early October, but it was eerily silent. The usual protesters were gone, as were the clinic escorts who used to shepherd patients past them \u2014 a once coveted role with a wait list. Only a couple of security guards remained, watching carefully as visitors approached. Inside, above the former clinic, on one of the administrative floors, the desks were mostly cleared. On some sat snow globes, still in their factory boxes, the words \u201cStill I Rise\u201d sealed in glycerin. \u201cStand With Black Women\u201d posters hung on the walls, and cardboard boxes were piled in the aisles, marked for their destinations at the city\u2019s remaining Planned Parenthoods.<\/p>\n Wendy Stark was still working there, and we spoke in her office. When the building\u2019s sale was announced in March, anti-abortion activists had immediately declared victory. It didn\u2019t feel great, she told me. \u201cBut the joke\u2019s on them. Because we\u2019re doing the care still. Just not right here.\u201d She didn\u2019t sound particularly convinced.<\/p>\n Most of the Bleecker Street staffers would soon be moving to positions at the Planned Parenthoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The Manhattan clinic had been known for its community sex-education programs, but ten educators had been laid off in the spring; their federal grants had been revoked under anti-DEI and anti-trans executive orders<\/a>. Some of the remaining staffers, whom I spoke to throughout the fall, were ambivalent about how to talk about their employer. One said, \u201cPlanned Parenthood is one of the most beleaguered agencies in the country, and so it\u2019s probably not the time to hit them while they\u2019re down.\u201d She then proceeded to air her grievances anyway. Employees had been overworked, she said; top brass, at the national level, were overpaid; patients faced what she believed were unnecessary requirements before medication abortions, including extra paperwork and intrusive additional exams such as ultrasounds. (A spokesperson for PPGNY disputed that patients were subject to any unnecessary steps.)<\/p>\n Other staffers described themselves as sad and bewildered. One noted that patients had often talked about how well the clinicians treated them and had been tearfully grateful for the care they received at Bleecker. Another remembered wondering why Manhattan\u2019s donor class hadn\u2019t stepped in. \u201cThey opened that floating island,\u201d she said. \u201cCome on. They can support a Planned Parenthood.\u201d<\/p>\n I asked Stark why a city full of wealthy liberals wasn\u2019t enough to keep the clinic open, but she didn\u2019t quite answer, saying only that private funds aren\u2019t a long-term strategy. In recent years, Medicaid funds have made up a little more than a third of the organization\u2019s revenue. Another third, roughly, has come from private donors, and the rest comes from patients who pay out of pocket or with private insurance.<\/p>\n A Bleecker Street staffer had told another journalist that the closure felt like Planned Parenthood was \u201cwaving a white flag,\u201d and I noted this to Stark. \u201cI know that people have a symbolic or emotional attachment to Planned Parenthood being in Manhattan,\u201d she replied. \u201cBut sustainability is more important than symbolism these days.\u201d Of the Greater New York affiliate\u2019s 18 clinics, she said, the Bleecker building was the \u201clargest real property asset by far.\u201d I understood the short-term math, though it also sounded like burning the house for kindling.<\/p>\n Stark insisted that the clinics would still be able to serve the same number of patients overall. She\u2019d been brought on at an unenviable time \u2014 in 2022, just a few months after the Dobbs decision. The onus was on New York and other blue states to provide abortion access to patients in states where it was banned or in dispute; it was new terrain both legally and logistically. At the same time, the Greater New York affiliate had its own problems. It was composed of what had previously been five independent chapters \u2014 one in the city and four upstate. They\u2019d merged in 2019, agreeing to share revenue and be managed by a single CEO, a move some staffers say was intended to help rural clinics keep their doors open. In Manhattan, staff worried that they would be overworked caring for more people in order to subsidize the locations that received fewer patients. (The spokesperson for PPGNY said that patient revenue from denser areas does not subsidize rural clinics.)<\/p>\n Similar mergers were playing out among other regional affiliates across the country, resulting in some tortured geographies, including a \u201cPlanned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai\u2019i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky,\u201d which included parts of Idaho and Washington State and carried the equally unwieldy acronym of PPGNHAIK. Many internal and external critics saw the consolidation as prioritizing finances over local relationships.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/c08ec7125c35251a719af6b816f7bbe8f6-GettyImages-1347202932.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Circa Images\/GHI\/Universal History Archive\/Universal Images\n <\/p>\n