Supreme Court Ruling Letting States Defund Planned Parenthood Could Save Thousands of Babies

The Supreme Court has overturned a lower court ruling preventing a pro-life state from redirecting Medicaid funding away from Planned Parenthood — a ruling pro-life advocates hailed as “historic,” saying it has them “prayerful” that other lawmakers will have the courage to exclude abortionists from federally funded programs.

Meanwhile, liberal judges and the abortion industry compared the decision to a Reconstruction-era case about white supremacists who engaged in the axe murder of an entire family and described depriving the abortion industry of government funds as “a grave injustice that strikes at the very bedrock of American freedom.”

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of South Carolina in a 6-3 decision on Medina v. Planned Parenthood, delivered Thursday morning.

“Seven years ago, we took a stand to protect the sanctity of life and defend South Carolina’s authority and values — and today, we are finally victorious,” said South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (R).

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McMaster said the ruling “affirmed” the legality of his 2018 executive order directing his state Department of Health and Human Services to remove Planned Parenthood South Atlantic from the state’s Medicaid provider list. A Planned Parenthood patient sued, arguing that the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid Act gives recipients the right to use any qualified provider of their choice — and she preferred the nation’s leading abortion business. A district court and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her favor.

But the Supreme Court ruling, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, found that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue.

Authors of the 60-year-old law made a careful distinction between Medicare and Medicaid, said the justices. While Congress “guaranteed” senior citizens the use of qualified doctors based on “[f]ree choice by patient,” the justices say the law makes no such assurance to Medicaid recipients. Instead, if the federal government believes a state does not comply with the law, it may withhold some or all of that state’s federal Medicaid funding until “satisfied that there will no longer be any such failure to comply.”

Justices reversed the decision of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and remanded it to that appellate court.

“States should be free to fund real, comprehensive care and exclude organizations like Planned Parenthood that profit off abortion and distribute dangerous gender transition drugs to minors,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel John Bursch, who argued before the court, told The Washington Stand shortly after the ruling. “The American people don’t want their tax dollars propping up the abortion industry.”

Pro-life advocates praised the “historic,” life-affirming decision.

This ‘Historic’ Decision ‘Saves Countless Unborn Babies’: Pro-Life Advocates

“The U.S. Supreme Court got it right,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told TWS. “South Carolina should not be forced to fund Planned Parenthood — a group that hides its abortion-first agenda behind a veil of cursory health services. Their own 2023-24 annual report tells the real story: a record 402,230 abortions and record $792.2 million in taxpayer funding. Meanwhile, patient numbers continue to decline, along with so-called health services like breast exams, prenatal care, and contraception.”

“By rejecting Planned Parenthood’s lawfare, the court not only saves countless unborn babies from a violent death and their mothers from dangerously shoddy ‘care,’ it also protects Medicaid from exposure to thousands of lawsuits from unqualified providers that would jeopardize the entire program,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America Director of Legal Affairs and Policy Counsel Katie Daniel told TWS. “Pro-life Republican leaders are eliminating government waste and prioritizing Medicaid for those who need it most – women, children, the poor, people with disabilities. Planned Parenthood was rightly disqualified. Multi-billion-dollar abortion businesses are not entitled to an unending money grab that forces taxpayers to fund America’s #1 cause of death: abortion.”

The White House agreed with the decision in principle, albeit in a non-committal way. “The president has always maintained that Americans should not be forced to violate their conscience and their religious liberty by having their tax dollars fund abortions, and we’re glad that the Supreme Court ruled on that side today,” said White House spokesperson Karen Leavitt at Thursday’s White House press briefing.

Leavitt declined to comment on whether President Trump supports federal legislation to defund Planned Parenthood.

In a statement sent to TWS, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said South Carolina “rightly decided to make its federal and state Medicaid dollars available for genuine, life-affirming health care options instead of using them to fund abortion giant Planned Parenthood — an organization that has aborted over 10 million babies since 1970, an absolutely numbing loss of life.”

“This decision frees other states to invest in real health care without fear that Planned Parenthood will misuse the court system to block a state’s right to administer its own Medicaid program and choose not to subsidize organizations that pay for elective abortion,” the pro-life congressman added.

Planned Parenthood’s supporters argue the Hyde Amendment prevents Medicaid from funding most abortions with federal tax dollars (although states may choose to cover elective abortions). But pro-life advocates say money is fungible, and taxpayers should not fund the organization through compulsory taxation. “Planned Parenthood — ‘Child Abuse Incorporated’ — goes to extraordinary lengths to ignore, trivialize, and cover-up the battered baby-victim, but the truth is that the elective decapitations, dismemberments, and starvation that Planned Parenthood commits and facilitates are not health care,” said Smith. “Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the multibillion-dollar abortion industry through their Medicaid dollars.”

“Not a single dime of taxpayer dollars should ever go to organizations that end innocent human life,” said Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.)

Elisa Martinez, executive director of the New Mexico Alliance for Life, told TWS the ruling represents an “historic victory for life.”

The U.S. government, 18 states, numerous members of Congress, and countless private citizens and organizations submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in favor of today’s decision. “Life wins. Sovereignty wins!!” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who boasted of leading one such amicus brief.

Abortionists: Defunding Abortionists ‘Strikes Very Bedrock of American Freedom’

The abortion industry grieved the loss of federal funds. The CEO of the Planned Parenthood affiliate in the lawsuit, Paige Johnson, called the ruling “a grave injustice that strikes at the very bedrock of American freedom.”

Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson noted her business offices had seen “approximately” 50,000 South Carolina Medicaid recipients — or 5% of the roughly 1 million enrollees. McGill added that Planned Parenthood provides “birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more,” not specifically naming two of Planned Parenthood’s largest areas of focus and profit: abortion and transgender procedures.

But polls show the decision to defund the nation’s largest abortion business would prove popular with voters. Six out of 10 (60% of) voters supported withholding taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood when they learned about reports of its poor quality services, according to a recent CRC Research survey for the Life Leadership Conference. A 70% supermajority of voters supported funding pregnancy resource centers or health care centers that do not commit abortion or transgender procedures.

Bona fide community health clinics outnumber Planned Parenthood offices 15 to 1.

“Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer-funded gravy train is swiftly coming to an end,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser told TWS. “Its days of posing as a ‘trusted health care provider’ are over as the truth is exposed — most recently, by revelations of botched procedures, open sewage and other horrifying conditions at their facilities across America and the tragic death of yet another young woman following a late-term abortion.”

Liberal Dissent: Defunding Planned Parenthood Like Ruling in Favor of Racist Mass Murderers

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored the liberal bloc’s dissent, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Jackson compared South Carolina’s pro-life advocates to South Carolinians who supported slavery, segregation, and mass murder. “A century and a half later, the project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws continues,” she wrote. The liberal justices likened the abortion defunding decision to civil rights cases of the 1870s and 1880s:

• Bylew v. the United States (1872), which upheld a Kentucky law barring black citizens from testifying against white people in most cases, including the four vicious, racially motivated axe murders at the center of this case.
• U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), which held the federal government could not prosecute a white militia that killed more than 100 free blacks exercising their right to vote.
• The 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which said the federal government could not regulate segregated private businesses.

“[A]s with those past rulings, today’s decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people,” wrote Jackson in a conclusion the majority rebutted in the decision itself.

“Our precedents do not authorize anything like the dissent’s approach — and for good reasons,” responded the majority opinion. Jackson bases her views on her “unspoken judicial intuition” which would “risk obliterating the longstanding line between mere benefits and enforceable rights.” The court’s conservative-leaning bloc added that giving every individual the right to “private enforcement does not always benefit the public, not least because it requires States to divert money and attention away from social services and toward litigation. And balancing those costs and benefits poses a question of public policy that, under our system of government, only Congress may answer.”

The court’s conservatives tracked how the right to sue the expansion of the federal welfare state created a notion that its recipients could sue the government to maintain their welfare rights. “For much of the Nation’s history, the Court had little occasion to employ these ideas. Congress rarely granted money to States and, when it did, those grants rarely came with many conditions. But that began to change during the New Deal.”

In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that the provision of the law in question, passed as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, “originated as a narrow, Reconstruction era statute” and “has exceeded its original limits.” The Supreme Court, beginning with the activist Warren Court, broadened the scope of private lawsuits in 1961’s Monroe v. Pape opinion and continuing for a generation. At the same time, the court redefined rights, beginning in 1970, “the Court held that welfare benefits, previously thought of as gratuities, are in fact property for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.”

In 1981, a more liberal Supreme Court ruled the law allowed citizens to sue the government over federal statutes, not simply constitutional rights — but the new category of lawsuits had to meet a “stringent” and “demanding” test to proving Congress “speaks with a clear voice, and manifests an unambiguous intent to confer individual rights” by including “rights-creating terms,” stated the majority opinion. The South Carolina case failed to meet that bar.

SCOTUS, President Trump Overturn a Decade of Democratic Executive Pressure

With Thursday’s decision, the Supreme Court and the Trump administration upended nearly a decade of Democratic attempts to promote Planned Parenthood through the power of the state. The Biden and Obama administrations repeatedly attempted to prevent states from implementing popular pro-life abortion funding policies. After 10 states had defunded Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program, the Obama administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent an April 2016 letter to all 50 states citing the any-qualified-provider statute to argue states refusing to fund abortionists may be “out of compliance with federal law.”

“While the Biden administration had defended individuals’ right to sue as the case moved through lower courts, the Trump administration switched sides and argued in support of South Carolina,” reported Politico.

The Supreme Court ruling did not settle the legality of states defunding Planned Parenthood under federal law; it merely denied plaintiffs’ standing. The Medina ruling leaves open the possibility that a future Democratic administration could withhold all federal Medicaid funding from a state that applies its pro-life convictions to its Medicaid providers list — something the Trump administration has not considered.

The case reminds voters of how long decisions take to work their way through the system and the consequences of each election — and each vote.

“State Medicaid programs should never be forced to fund abortions, especially through Planned Parenthood, which is a nonprofit but always profits billions off the shedding of innocent blood through abortion. We’re prayerful that this sets a precedent for future rulings with regard to defunding other abortion businesses using taxpayer dollars, which is in violation of many taxpaying Americans’ moral consciences,” Tara Shaver of Abortion Free New Mexico told TWS.

Defunding Planned Parenthood Provision Stripped Out of One Big Beautiful Bill …

The One Bill Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1) originally aimed to defund Planned Parenthood and any other group that carries out abortions or transgender procedures, but Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled Thursday morning those provisions, along with other Medicaid reform measures, violated a Senate rule that budget bills not contain any extraneous riders. The Byrd Rule, adopted in the mid-1980s at the urging of long-serving Democratic senator and former Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd, established a six-prong test to determine whether a provision belonged in a budget bill.

MacDonough, appointed by the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, acted as an adviser to then-Vice President Al Gore.

While Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) called for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to fire  MacDonough, Thune vowed to abide by her decision.

“Defund Planned Parenthood now!” demanded Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) Thursday morning.

… But More States May Now Defund Planned Parenthood

But the Supreme Court ruling — handed down almost three years to the day of the Dobbs decision — paves the way for the nation’s pro-life and fiscally conservative states to redirect Medicaid funds away from Planned Parenthood. “Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms the vital role that states play in protecting the integrity and priorities of their own health care systems,” Janice L. Martino-Gottshall, senior counsel at the Independence Law Center, told TWS. “The Supreme Court’s ruling in Medina v. Planned Parenthood is a significant win for state authority, patient care, and constitutional balance,” agreed Judge Cheryl Lynn Allen (Ret.), also of the Independence Law Center, which filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of 41 state family policy councils.

“Now that the [Supreme] Court has ruled, every pro-life state should follow suit and end funding to the nation’s largest abortion provider. And Congress must ensure” it cuts off “taxpayer dollars to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood — once and for all,” concluded Perkins.

LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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