(LifeSiteNews) — Planned Parenthood may be most notorious for abortion-on-demand, but is nearly as aggressive in supplying cross-sex hormones to gender-confused teenagers, according to a new report by the pro-life group Live Action. 

Alongside its abortion focus, Planned Parenthood advertises itself as a “safe and welcoming place to get [so-called] transgender/nonbinary hormone therapy,” including estrogen, anti-androgen, testosterone, and puberty blockers. According to its most recent annual report, 45 of its affiliates offered what it calls “gender-affirming hormone therapy” in 2022.

For its latest investigation, Live Action had an undercover reporter place phone calls to Planned Parenthood locations in Minnesota, Oregon, Maine, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Colorado, and Washington, D.C. At seven out of 33 facilities, staffers “confirmed they would prescribe cross-sex hormones at the first appointment, even virtually.” Staffers at five facilities said even minors “did not need proof of having undergone therapy, mental health clearance, or prior documentation as part of a mental health assessment.”

READ: Planned Parenthood faces numerous allegations of botched abortions, other injuries: New York Times

“Some pharmacies do take a little bit to get it together. But yeah, if not the same day, then more than likely the very next day,” an employee in Minnesota claimed. A New York staffer assured the caller that 16-year-olds could get hormones, and when the caller brought up not being comfortable having her mother with her “the whole time,” was told, “at some point in the appointment, maybe she doesn’t have to be in the examining room with you.”

“Our undercover reporting has exposed a chilling reality: Planned Parenthood is fast-tracking vulnerable children into irreversible hormone [interventions] with almost no medical oversight,” Live Action founder and president Lila Rose said. “These dangerous drugs can sterilize, stunt growth, and leave lifelong scars. This is not healthcare. It is child abuse, and it must be stopped.”

Live Action also notes a recent report from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) that recognizes Planned Parenthood as “the country’s leading provider” of “hormones for young people,” citing 2024 reporting by The Free Press.

“In recent years, Planned Parenthood clinics have adopted an expedited access policy on an ‘informed consent’ basis,” the report says, quoting Planned Parenthood North Central States medical director Nicole Chaisson as dismissing the necessity of “gatekeeping” on the grounds that “people are the experts of their own body” and expressly endorsing giving minors hormone prescriptions after just one visit.

“Jamie Reed, the former case manager at the Washington University pediatric gender clinic in St. Louis, had previously worked at Planned Parenthood,” the report continues. “Reed testified in a deposition that her clinic would refer minor patients to Planned Parenthood ‘when we did not have consent from legal guardians’ because Planned Parenthood would get ‘these kid’s scripts [prescriptions] when they did not meet’ diagnostic criteria. Although Planned Parenthood requires consent from an adult caregiver to prescribe hormones to minors, Reed said that Planned Parenthood ‘would not verify who the adult is that is bringing [the minor patient] to the building.’”

One victim of Planned Parenthood’s approach, detransitioner Elle Palmer, testified in Connecticut last month about her experience being prescribed testosterone at age 16: “I told the doctor about my traumatic female puberty with debilitating painful periods, severe suicidal thoughts, and self-harm, and anxiety so bad that I dropped out of school. I told him that I went to a children’s mental hospital three times before I was 14 […] they believed the root cause was due to my internal sense of gender identity. Transition was supposed to be the cure. Not even a history of sexual abuse will stop these medical professionals from putting a young girl on testosterone.”

“Ten years later, you’ll hear supporters of this bill call this ‘life-saving care.’ When I was 19, I went back to Planned Parenthood. I told them I was female to male but I wanted to go back to female. They didn’t know what to do,” she added. “As weeks turned to months eventually every single doctor had called me back saying, ‘I don’t know. Maybe another doctor can help you.’ Planned Parenthood could easily put a teenage girl on testosterone, but no one in the entire state knew how to treat a woman who just wanted her female body back.”

A significant 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.

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”

So-called “gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”