The Butcher of Omaha: Warren Buffett, the Gates Foundation, and Billions for Abortion (Pt. 1)

He’s been called the “Wizard of Omaha,” America’s most revered investor and famous penny pincher. But that conceals Warren Buffett’s dark side: Untold billions of dollars for abortion-on-demand in the U.S. and experiments on poor Africans, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this groundbreaking report, Restoration News exposes this massive money pipeline—including its favorite outlet, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—and reveals Buffett’s global depopulation agenda.

The biggest funder of abortion in human history poses as America’s most celebrated philanthropist.

He’s the sixth-wealthiest man in the world, with a net worth exceeding $117 billion. You know him as the “Oracle,” “Sage,” or “Wizard” of Omaha, Nebraska, for his magic ability to predict market trends, a skill he began honing at age 11. And he’s perhaps the country’s most frugal billionaire, living in the same house he bought in 1958 for $31,500, driving a modest car, and breakfasting on McDonalds (sometimes with coupons).

When asked about his great success, Warren Buffett’s answer is poignant:

My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.

Although his father, Howard, was a Republican congressman representing Omaha in the 1940s, Buffett isn’t especially vocal about his political views. He describes himself as something short of a “card-carrying Democrat”—though he’s called for higher taxes on the wealthy and sympathizes with socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Leftists regularly chide him for not being “progressive” enough in the boardroom of Berkshire Hathaway, the $381 billion company he’s run since 1965.

Yet this unassuming investment giant deserves another title: the secret patron of Abortion Inc.

Since 2000, Buffett has funneled an incredible $5.3 billion into abortion providers as well as the vast array of activist, lobbying, and policy groups insulating the abortion industry in Washington—and that’s a conservative figure.

It’s enough to pay for nearly 10 million abortions at $550 a pop, according to estimates from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Portugal or Greece; or the combined populations of New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North and South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming, and Vermont; or better yet, enough to abort all the people living in Buffett’s home state, Nebraska, five times over.

You’d think this stunning fact would warrant more media attention. Yet Buffett’s support for pro-death groups has flown under the radar because it’s masked as “philanthropy.”

Since 2002, Buffett has poured a stunning $41 billion into four foundations, each of which bankrolls groups expanding abortion-on-demand policies nationwide or even sustain the United Nations’ population control campaign in impoverished countries. Three of these little-known foundations are controlled by Buffett’s close family members. The fourth is anything but obscure—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the biggest grantmaking institutions in the world and a mainstay of the Left.

At least part of this largesse stems from the Giving Pledge, a campaign Buffett and his close friend Bill Gates launched in 2010 to commit the ultra-wealthy to give away a majority of their wealth (in their case, 99 percent of it). While not necessarily political, many of the pledgers routinely funnel their millions into “progressive” activism, including Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll of eBay. In 2011, then-President Barack Obama even hosted Buffett in the White House for an “update” on the Giving Pledge’s progress.

For Buffett, that means donating nearly all of his Berkshire Hathaway shares—routing billions of dollars to these four politically active foundations and making Buffett one of the Left’s top mega-donors and, in CNBC’s words, America’s “most charitable billionaire.”

In this report, Restoration News digs deep into the Buffett machine to reveal his far-reaching influence across America’s political landscape, including his support for the world’s top “dark money” network. We make no secret of our goal: Rebranding Warren Buffett as the next George Soros and restoring genuine philanthropy to its original purpose, the Christian love of one’s neighbor.

The Devil You Don’t Know

To most it’s unheard of, but Buffett’s funding for abortion advocacy and contraception has made him a hero in leftist circles. “Have an IUD? Thank Warren Buffett,” the Washington Post wrote in 2015, referencing his support for intrauterine device development in the early 2000s.

“You mean you didn’t know Warren Buffett’s foundation has been funding abortion rights organizations?” NPR wrote in 2006. “Well, that’s just the way the Buffetts wanted it.”

“Warren Buffett has never spoken publicly about his views on abortion,” the New York Times observed in 2010. “But in the 1990s [his foundation] helped finance the research and development of the [mifepristone] pills that induce abortion . . . [and] helped finance a lawsuit to overturn the ban on so-called partial-birth abortion in Nebraska.”

Even far-left Vox dropped its usual “eat-the-rich” dogma in 2019 to praise the Omaha billionaire:

If you could snap your fingers and rid the world of billionaire philanthropists instantly, hundreds of millions of women worldwide would lose access to contraception, and Buffett is the leading provider of abortion access for poor women in the U.S. [emphasis added].

Buffett’s late ex-wife, Susan Thompson, arguably revealed more about his pro-abortion views than did the Omaha investor. “Warren feels that women all over the world get shortchanged,” she told Charlie Rose in a 2004 TV interview. “That’s why he’s so pro-choice.”

“For Warren, it’s economic,” an ex-Buffett Foundation program director told Bloomberg four years later (though the interview wasn’t revealed until 2015).

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.

That’s a feminist spin on an uglier belief in looming overpopulation. For decades, Buffett’s committed a fortune to what his biographer calls his “Malthusian dread” (named for 19th century British demographer Thomas Malthus) that humans will reproduce ourselves into oblivion, endangering global supplies of “food, housing, and even human survival.”

“[Population control] was what my father has always believed was the biggest and most important issue,” Susie Buffett told the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 1997, “so that will be the [foundation’s] focus.”

Long before the Supreme Court discovered constitutional abortion “rights” in Roe v. Wade (1973), Buffett and key business partner Charlie Munger, a liberal Republican, organized what Munger called an “underground railroad” for arranging abortions in states where the procedure was legal:

Warren and I were revolutionaries. We created a church that was used as an underground railroad. We supported the Clergy Counseling Service [a group of liberal ministers who arranged abortions for women outside the U.S.]. The minister running it was cashiered by his own church for helping women get abortions.

First I tried to persuade the church to let him continue. That failed. I called Warren and asked him to help me establish our own church. That we did. For years this minister ran the thing. That was our contribution, trying to help so that society didn’t force women to give birth—to be held in a system [ecologist and overpopulation alarmist] Garrett Hardin called ‘mandatory motherhood’ [emphasis added].

The Buffett-Munger support for population control supposedly came to an end in 2003, when Buffett announced he would cease donating Berkshire Hathaway shares to pro-abortion groups in a resounding victory for the pro-life activists who boycotted the company into cutting off Planned Parenthood and its allies.

But victory proved a ruse.

The Butcher of Omaha

Far from suspending it, Buffett’s support for anti-life groups was redirected into his family foundations—and skyrocketed.

Restoration News analyzed thousands of grants paid over the past two decades by the Illinois-based Howard G. Buffett Foundation, named for and led by Warren’s eldest son; the New York-based NoVo Foundation, chaired by second son Peter; and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for Warren’s late ex-wife and headed by daughter Susie and her ex-husband, Allen Greenberg.

Between them, these philanthropies posted $15.5 billion in revenues between 2002 and 2022, 81 percent of which came from Warren as cash or Berkshire Hathaway stock. (A portion of that sum came from Susan, who separated from Warren in 1977 but never divorced, and left her Berkshire shares to the foundation upon her death in 2004.)

Among the recipients seemingly cut off in 2003 was Family Health International (FHI), which used the funds to distribute the chemical quinacrine hydrochloride—illegal in the U.S.—used to sterilize women by burning their fallopian tubes. One of FHI’s aims is to lower global population in part to combat global warming. After 2003, FHI received another $7 million from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.

Another is Ipas, which invented and markets manual vacuum aspiration technology—literally sucking out embryos and fetuses from the womb—in more than 100 countries. Since 2003, Ipas has received over $422 million from Buffett family foundations—so much for cutting it off.

We’ve recorded the top pro-abortion groups funded by Buffett family foundations below. While groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood are infamous, many of these groups are hardly known on the Right.

Marie Stopes International (MSI) is Britain’s equivalent to Planned Parenthood and a top provider of (often illegal) abortions overseas. In 2021, MSI’s Australian branch admitted that 1 in 20 women retain fragments of the baby and/or placenta in their uterus following an MSI abortion. A 2016 British government inquiry found that MSI doctors reportedly pressured patients as young as 16—some with learning disabilities—to undergo abortions, often ignoring or bulk-signing the pre-consent forms required by U.K. law to ensure that women understand the consequences of aborting their babies. A year later, authorities discovered that MSI staff were “encouraged” to suggest patients undergo abortions because it was “linked to their performance bonuses,” which inspectors labeled its “cattle market culture.” (They also found that female staff were paid 45 percent less than their male counterparts.)

The head of MSI’s South African chapter boasted in 2007 before a British audience that “we do illegal abortions all over the world.” It got so bad that Zambia kicked MSI out of the country in 2012 for carrying out 490 illegal abortions. A former MSI staffer admitted that the group performed illegal abortions in Uganda under cover of providing birth control services. Pro-life activists report similar evils in Tanzania.

Kenya, whose constitution stipulates that “the life of a person begins at conception,” has barred MSI from offering abortions in-country. In 2020, however, Kenyan police caught MSI pitching the decomposing corpses of 10 babies illegally aborted by unregistered MSI practitioners into a Nairobi dumpster. The men were arrested and the facility shut down.

It’s likely that most, if not all, of the $536 million paid to MSI’s U.S. arm by Buffett family foundations went to fund countless abortions in the U.K. and Africa. And you’re paying for it, too—USAID, our government’s foreign aid arm, has distributed at least $187 million to MSI and its African affiliates since 2010. It’s also raked in $455 million from the British government since 2009.

Another under-the-radar group is Pathfinder International, which used its funding to overturn the Trump administration’s Mexico City Policy—a ban on federal funding of groups that perform abortions overseas created by Ronald Reagan and overturned by every Democratic president and reinstated by every Republican president since then.

In the past decade, Pathfinder used close to $1 billion from USAID to abort Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans and push looser abortion policies in poor countries. Pathfinder was seeded in the 1950s by Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble soap fortune, himself a committed eugenicist and ally of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger who sat on the group’s board. Many are familiar with Sanger’s “Negro Project of the South” to expand birth control and abortion to southern blacks; few realize she got the idea from Clarence Gamble, the project’s funder.

EngenderHealth is a little-known group that provides abortions in poor countries. 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 (more on that later).

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). Excessive bleeding is a common side effect, requiring large quantities of blood bags to avoid lethal hemorrhaging. The Susan Thompson Buffett and Gates Foundations are Gynuity’s top identified donors.

Advocates for Youth is one of the lead transgender groups grooming schoolchildren for gay sex, pedophilia, and HIV—thanks to $29 million from Buffett. We’ve recorded its vision for sex education in classrooms, which includes teaching second-graders about sexual consent, fifth-graders about “trusted adults” whom they “can talk to about relationships” (invariably sexual), and tenth-graders about the latest medical breakthroughs that make living with HIV tolerable.

Buffett family foundations are also top donors to Arabella Advisors’ $1.6 billion “dark money” network, the most powerful leftist lobbying force in the country. We’ve traced $215 million to Arabella’s New Venture Fund and Hopewell Fund from Buffett family foundations. In fact, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation may be the largest single donor to the Hopewell Fund. It’s likely that much of that money was passed through to activist groups such as Planned Parenthood and MSI, but a big portion funded Arabella’s own in-house “pop-up” abortion fronts.

What’s amazing is how much the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation downplays its support for these causes. The simple website (BuffettScholarships.org) advertises grants for Nebraska college students, nothing more; visitors are sternly told that “other inquiries” will be ignored. That includes the left-leaning media such as Inside Philanthropy, which noted in 2020 that the Buffett Foundation often includes a “funding stipulation” against grantees talking with the media.

Yet it’s believed that the 91-year-old Warren may leave as much as $100 billion to his family foundations to bankroll abortion groups after he dies—grimly satisfying his Giving Pledge to support “philanthropy.”

Aborting the Third World

Amazingly, the billions Warren Buffett has shelled out to his family foundations pales in comparison to the nearly $33 billion he’s funneled into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2006, accounting for 39 percent of its total revenues. Those days may be at an end since Bill and Melinda’s divorce, however, which prompted Buffett to resign from the board.

The Gates Foundation is famous for funding numerous public health campaigns, including development and dissemination of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. It also deserves notoriety as one of the world’s top funders of global population control measures in developing countries.

We’ve traced $107 million from the Gates Foundation to Planned Parenthood; $112 million to Marie Stopes International; $17 million to the Guttmacher Institute; and $22 million to Ipas.

But that’s nothing compared to the $5.5 billion paid by the foundation to the World Health Organization, which considers abortion access essential to a woman’s “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” In fact, pro-abortion groups routinely lobby for federal laws to enshrine abortion rights in the U.S. Constitution and preempt state restrictions “in accordance with the 2022 World Health Organization Abortion Care guidelines.”

We’ve also traced $862 million from Gates to a spate of organizations that support global depopulation, in part through abortion, sterilization, and mass contraception: the Population Council, Population Reference Bureau, Population Services International, Population Foundation of India, Population Action International, and the United Nations Population Fund.

The last of these is closely aligned with the UN’s Family Planning 2020 campaign, whose top private donor is the Gates Foundation. (Sadly, you’re also paying for it through USAID.)

The campaign’s objective was extending “reproductive health and rights” to 120 million people in poor countries by the end of 2020, in part by loosening local abortion laws. Planned Parenthood, Marie Stopes International, and other pro-abortion groups are members. When the campaign failed to meet its goal, it simply readjusted—meet Family Planning 2030, which has expanded its scope to include altering “gender norms” (read: gay marriage), “inclusivity of all genders,” and promoting local “feminist movements.”

In Part 2, see how conservatives at the National Legal & Policy Center push back against Buffett’s abortion extremism—and pay the price. Read it here.

PDF version available here.