(LifeSiteNews) — With newly-enforceable pro-life laws cutting into the abortion industry’s bottom line over the past year, the abortion-on-demand movement persists in large part due to the support of wealthy far-left financiers, one of the biggest of which is investor Warren Buffett.
Buffett, the 93-year-old CEO of multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway and the fifth richest man in the world at a net worth of $106 billion, is known in the mainstream as a philanthropist. This week, however, an extensive report by Restoration News’s Hayden Ludwig (Part 1, Part 2) details how Buffett has poured “billions” of dollars into the cause of “choice” as part of a broader depopulation agenda.
Buffett has given at least $5.3 billion to abortion “providers” and domestic pro-abortion activist groups since 2000, according to the report, “enough to pay for nearly 10 million abortions at $550 a pop.”
Since 2002, he has also given $41 billion to four foundations that promote pro-abortion policies abroad. Three are operated by Buffett’s relatives; the fourth is the notorious, far-left Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The report notes that several liberal media outlets over the years have favorably described Buffett as a “leading provider of abortion access for poor women in the U.S.” (Vox in 2019), and even having “helped finance the research and development of the [mifepristone] pills that induce abortion” in the 1990s (New York Times, 2010).
“He thinks that unless women can control their fertility – and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility – that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States. Well, not just the United States. Worldwide,” a former Buffett Foundation program director told Bloomberg in an interview published in 2015.
Population control “was what my father has always believed was the biggest and most important issue,” Buffett’s daughter Susie said in 1997.
Buffett’s passion for the issue dates back to before Roe v. Wade, to the point that he “created a church that was used as an underground railroad” to facilitate abortions in permissive states, according to business partner Charlie Munger, who would go on to become chief financial officer for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.
Buffett announced in 2003 that Berkshire Hathaway shares would no longer be donated to pro-abortion groups. “But victory proved a ruse,” Ludwig writes. A review of “thousands of grants paid over the past two decades” by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, NoVo Foundation, and Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (all operated by Buffett family members) found that they gave more than $3 billion to global pro-abortion organizations, including Planned Parenthood, Marie Stopes International, the National Abortion Federation, NARAL, DKT International, and more – money that directly helped kill an unfathomable number babies.
For example, “it’s likely that most, if not all, of the $536 million paid to [Marie Stopes International’s] U.S. arm by Buffett family foundations went to fund countless abortions in the U.K. and Africa,” Ludwig says.
“EngenderHealth is a little-known group that provides abortions in poor countries,” the report continues. “Even less well-known is its original name: The Sterilization League of New Jersey, one of a crop of sterilization advocacy groups created by eugenicists in the 1930s… Then there’s Gynuity Health Projects, a New York nonprofit that conducts horrifying experiments on women in Burkina Faso, a destitute West African country (GDP per person: $715). Gynuity provides mail-order abortifacients in the U.S. designed to induce a miscarriage in the first trimester; the drugs tested in Africa would extend that to the second trimester (28 weeks).”
Notably, the foundations also contribute to the so-called “dark money” network of Arabella Advisors, which supports a variety of left-wing causes and was recently linked to a push to investigate pro-life Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo.
Buffett’s foundation also gave almost $33 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2006, which amounts to 39% of the group’s total revenue. The Gates Foundation is an aggressive financier of abortion-on-demand and population control in its own right.
“If we had an independent chair, the Company would be less identified with Mr. Buffett’s political activities. He’s donated tens of billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” said National Legal & Policy Center chairman and Berkshire shareholder Peter Flaherty during the company’s annual meeting in May. “As Bill Gates explained when the couple was still together, ‘although the foundation bears our names, basically half our resources have come from Warren Buffett.’ If ‘woke’ culture is a disease, then philanthropy is the virus.” Flaherty was arrested and charged with criminal trespass for his stand.
Now that Roe v. Wade no longer insulates abortion from the democratic process in America, fifteen states ban all or most abortions, with available data so far indicating that pro-life state laws could effectively wipe out an estimated 200,000 abortions a year. But thanks to both investors like Buffett and taxpayer funding, the abortion lobby is far from destitute.
In June, American Life League’s STOPP International 2023 Report on Planned Parenthood CEO Compensation found that all 53 chief executive officers of Planned Parenthood affiliates make more than $100,000 per year, with the average compensation rising from $237,999 in 2015 to $317,564 in 2020. Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s president Alexis McGill Johnson makes $683,697, and its top 10 affiliate heads all made more than $450,000, far higher than the average salary for U.S. nonprofit CEOs of $184,809.
In April, Planned Parenthood released its first post-Roe annual report, which revealed that the organization received $670.4 million in taxpayer funds last year (which Catholic University of America professor and top pro-life researcher Michael New calls a “significant 5.8 percent increase from 2021”), as well as $360.9 million in non-government service revenue and $694.9 million in private donations.