Planned Parenthood handed out pizza parties to reward employees for pushing more abortions, one former worker revealed.
That claim is landing months after Congress let Planned Parenthood's Medicaid defunding quietly expire, restoring hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.
Former staff say the pizza parties were only the beginning of how Planned Parenthood chased its numbers.
Planned Parenthood Nurses and Managers Describe Being Pushed to Hit Abortion Quotas
Live Action calls the project DEFUND 250, and it has been gathering these accounts – some fresh, some over a decade old – as the funding fight plays out in Washington.
Marianne Anderson worked as a nurse for Planned Parenthood before she went public with what the job actually felt like.
She put it bluntly: "I felt like I was more of a salesman, sometimes, to sell abortion."
Annette Lancaster, another former employee, said staff were pushed to keep working on women who seemed unsure about going through with an abortion.
She described it this way: "We were lying to these women."
Lancaster said she was written up twice by management after her clinic's abortion numbers dropped.
Former manager Ramona Treviño said patient appointments got shorter as the pressure for volume increased.
Her assessment was blunt: "Planned Parenthood treated women like cattle."
That's the same culture former employee Sue Thayer described before she died – she said clinics rewarded staff with paid time off and pizza parties for hitting higher abortion numbers.
Nicole Moore, a former employee who sued over what she called structural racism inside the organization, said the stress triggered a panic attack that landed her in the hospital.
Mayra Rodriguez ran a Planned Parenthood facility in Arizona before she was fired for raising concerns about botched abortions and employee misconduct.
She said the organization failed to comply with mandatory abuse-reporting laws, and she alleged one physician alone was tied to half of the state's reported abortion complications.
Rodriguez sued over her firing and won a 3 million dollar settlement.
Her case is not an isolated one, either.
Back in 2015, seven former Planned Parenthood employees sent a formal letter to a House oversight subcommittee describing what they called potentially criminal and fraudulent acts inside the organization.
"The extent of these problems with the organization is not fully understood by the American people," they wrote.
Anderson, Lancaster, Treviño, and Thayer are just the newest chapter of that same warning.
Congress Let Planned Parenthood's Medicaid Defunding Expire Right As These Claims Piled Up
Former employee Jessa Crispin said Planned Parenthood charged women 400 to 600 dollars for abortion medication that cost the organization roughly 90 dollars to obtain.
That kind of markup is not new – regulators have caught Planned Parenthood affiliates overbilling Medicaid before.
A series of federal audits found 7.8 million dollars in Medicaid overpayments across four states, and a separate whistleblower case in Texas ended in a 4.3 million dollar settlement paid out to the employee who exposed it.
None of that stopped Washington from turning the money back on.
Congress defunded Planned Parenthood from Medicaid for one year under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and that provision expired on the Fourth of July – the same week the country marked its 250th birthday.
Planned Parenthood is now positioned to collect as much as 800 million taxpayer dollars a year again.
Planned Parenthood has not publicly responded to any of the specific employee allegations compiled under Live Action's DEFUND 250 project.
A Pregnancy Resource Center Gave One Mother What Planned Parenthood Never Did
A woman named Gabi walked into Matrix LifeCare Center struggling with alcoholism and unsure what to do about her pregnancy.
She got an ultrasound instead of a quota pitch.
"It was amazing," Gabi said.
"It's like a whole new light came into my life when I saw him for the first time."
She named her son Braxton, got sober, finished parenting classes, and found stable housing with the center's help.
"Seeing my son completely turned my life around," she said, "like a whole one-eighty."
That is the model Planned Parenthood's own former staff say the organization never gave them room to run.
Centers like Matrix LifeCare are not a fringe operation, either.
The latest tally, from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, found more than 2,775 pregnancy centers served over a million new clients and provided 452 million dollars in free medical care, supplies and support.
Eight in ten of those centers offer free or reduced-cost medical services, staffed by more than 10,000 medical professionals.
Boebert and Tenney Are Already Moving to Defund Planned Parenthood Again
Two lawmakers are not waiting around for Planned Parenthood to answer for any of this.
Rep. Lauren Boebert has reintroduced her Defund Planned Parenthood Act, which would strip Planned Parenthood's federal funding and redirect it to community health centers instead.
Rep. Claudia Tenney has reintroduced the Pregnancy Resource Center Defense Act, which raises the criminal penalties for anyone who vandalizes or attacks centers like the one that helped Gabi.
That's the real fight underneath all of this – not whether one organization gets a check from Washington, but whether the woman walking through the door gets a nurse who tells her the truth or a manager chasing a quota.
The women who used to work inside Planned Parenthood already answered that question, and so did Gabi.
Sources:
- Carole Novielli, "DEFUND 250: Planned Parenthood Staff Describe Its Disturbing Practices," Live Action, 2026.
- Carole Novielli, "DEFUND 250: Employees Allege Internal Corruption at Planned Parenthood," Live Action, April 3, 2026.
- Live Action, "Medicaid Defunding of Planned Parenthood Expired as America Celebrated 250th Anniversary," Live Action, 2026.
- Fox News, "Abby Johnson: Ex-Planned Parenthood Clinic Director Deserves 3 Million Court Award in Wrongful-Firing Case," Fox News, 2026.
- Office of Rep. Claudia Tenney, "Tenney Reintroduces the Pregnancy Resource Center Defense Act," January 2025.
- "Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2025," H.R. 271, 119th Congress, Congress.gov, 2025.
- National Right to Life, "An Ultrasound at a Pregnancy Center Completely Turned My Life Around, Says Mother," NRLC News Today, June 2026.
- Charlotte Lozier Institute, "New Pregnancy Centers Provided Over 452 Million in Services and Goods to Families," Lozier Institute, November 2025.
