Whole Women’s Health was one of the largest providers of abortion in Minnesota, at least until 2020. For at least six months in 2020, the state of Minnesota’s abortion report showed that Whole Women’s Health committed zero abortions.

Eagle-eyed pro-life activists, including Pro-Life Action Ministry’s Brian Gibson, quickly realized that couldn’t be true. After all, pro-life activists were outside Whole Women’s Health every day last year - they knew women had entered the premises to receive abortions.

Abortion reporting is taken seriously in Minnesota, with the potential of financial penalties for a late or inaccurate report. So did Whole Women’s Health fail to report accurate numbers? Or did the state garble the report?

I wanted to get information straight from the source, so I called Whole Women’s Heath. After a long day, I was finally able to get Jackie Dilworth, Director of Marketing and Communications for the abortion chain, to pick up the phone.

She admitted that there had been a “reporting error” and that corrected numbers had been submitted to the state of Minnesota. With a little prompting, she even revealed to me the corrected number: 1,256 abortions. Only 137 are listed on the states’s abortion report, meaning there are more than 1,000 missing abortions.

This is a difference between a record low for abortions in Minnesota, as we reported earlier, with 9,108 included in the states’s report, and an increase over 2019’s total of 9,910. Abortion in Minnesota has once again crossed the 10,000 mark. With the real totals now revealed by Whole Women’s Health, we now estimate that the state’s total for 2020 was 10,227.

This is a big deal. Because of Whole Women’s Health’s failure to report correct numbers, the people of Minnesota were misled into believing that abortion declined in Minnesota, when in fact it increased. We hope that the Minnesota Department of Health will hold WWH accountable for this “reporting error.”

Multiple calls and voicemails to the Minnesota Department of Health’s office of statistics have gone unanswered.