SCOTUS Backs South Carolina Effort to Defund Planned Parenthood
Thursday, June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, allowed South Carolina to block Planned Parenthood's access to federal Medicaid funding for non-abortion services. The ruling allows states to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for care not related to abortion, including cancer screenings.
The ruling, with all three liberal justices dissenting, reversed a lower-court decision that had allowed Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and a patient to seek to reinstate the group’s clinics as qualified healthcare providers after South Carolina cut off all Medicaid funding for the organization because it offers abortion services, Washington Post’s Ann E. Marimow reported. “The decision means patients who rely on Medicaid will not be able to use the government insurance program for the poor to get services at the Planned Parenthood clinics in South Carolina.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the court. “After all, the decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy,” he wrote. “Like other States, South Carolina has an administrative process that lets providers challenge their exclusion from the State’s Medicaid program.”
In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stated: “That means we do have a sense of what comes next: as with those past rulings, today’s decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people. At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them. And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians—and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country—of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable’.”
“Patients need access to birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more. And right now, lawmakers in Congress are trying to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood as part of their long-term goal to shut down Planned Parenthood and ban abortion nationwide,” Alexis McGill Johnson, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took to the social media platform X and wrote, “The Supreme Court just paved the way for states to 'defund' Planned Parenthood. At the same time, Republicans are pushing a bill that would go even further—closing 1 in 3 locations. Americans will have nowhere else to go to get the health care that Planned Parenthood provides.”
