WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is calling on the Trump administration to investigate Planned Parenthood for potential Medicaid fraud in its “gender transition” side business.

While Planned Parenthood is best known as the nation’s largest abortion chain, it is also deeply involved in the LGBT movement. It advertises itself as a “safe and welcoming place to get [so-called] transgender/nonbinary hormone therapy,” including estrogen, anti-androgen, testosterone, and puberty blockers.

In a June 11 letter to U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Hawley notes that the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) “found that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates received more than $1.5 billion in Medicaid and Medicare payments in a 3-year period,” dollars which “apparently have been used to prop up Planned Parenthood’s provision of transgender procedures to children.”

Oz is currently reviewing the Medicare and Medicaid programs for potential fraud, and Hawley urges him to review Planned Parenthood’s “compliance with applicable laws and regulations. The organization’s transgender activities appear at the least to subvert Congress’s intent to direct Medicaid and Medicare funds to basic healthcare needs. They may also violate regulations governing how these dollars may be spent and fail to comply with Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rules.”

As of the abortion giant’s 2022–2023 annual report, 45 of its affiliates offered so-called “gender-affirming hormone therapy” in 2022. Its previous report said 30 affiliates participated in 69 medical studies, an unspecified number of which involved so-called “care” to reinforce gender dysphoria.

Notably, the latest on that aspect of the business was obscured in Planned Parenthood’s 2024–2025 annual report, which highlighted work on a study it says will detail the “harm” of “state-based restrictions on gender-affirming care” but downplayed its own involvement in that “care,” listing only a small footnote that “transgender services” were among the various items included in its 50,411 “Other Procedures.” 

A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that, “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”

In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through gender transitions had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”