SCOTUS Fallout No One Is Talking About
Today's ruling could drive Planned Parenthood patients to crisis pregnancy centers
The Supreme Court issued a devastating decision today that all but encourages conservative states to defund Planned Parenthood—or any other health care provider they don’t agree with.
The 6-3 ruling in Medina v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic allows South Carolina Republicans to block Planned Parenthood from participating in its Medicaid program. The Republican-led state argued that because Planned Parenthood provides abortions, they shouldn’t get any funding—even for non-abortion care like contraception, cancer screenings, and STI treatment.
The decision also effectively strips low-income Americans of their right to choose their own healthcare provider: While federal law says Medicaid patients have the right to choose any "qualified" provider, SCOTUS found that patients don’t have the right to invoke that law in court.
Most importantly, today’s ruling won’t just impact patients in South Carolina: As The 19th points out, the ruling “offers a template” to other states seeking to defund Planned Parenthood. (And there are quite a few of them!) Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson referred to the ruling as “a backdoor abortion ban,” and part of the anti-abortion movement’s “long-term goal to shut down Planned Parenthood.”
More than that, the ruling raises the possibility that states could refuse funding to any kind of provider they don’t approve of—whether it’s over abortion, gender-affirming care, or STI and HIV treatment. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the powerhouse legal group representing the state, argued that the state can disqualify Medicaid providers for "any reason that state law allows." (Aka, if they don’t like their politics.)
In a scathing dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that today’s decision “is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.”
“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’.”
In the meantime, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is figuring out their next steps. Vicki Ringer, Director of Public Affairs, says, “As not to further confuse patients or cause them more suffering, we will continue to see Medicaid patients without charging them or Medicaid for that care.”
You can read the full decision here.
Another important thing about the ruling that might not get a lot of coverage elsewhere: the connection to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.
If Planned Parenthood clinics can’t accept Medicaid, conservatives have a plan to fill that healthcare gap: they want to drive vulnerable patients to religious anti-abortion institutions.
A release from ADF today celebrates the decision as directing funds “away from the abortion industry, toward real health care.” ADF Senior Counsel John Bursch repeats the sentiment, saying, “states should be free to fund real, comprehensive care and exclude organizations like Planned Parenthood…”
What ‘real, comprehensive’ healthcare are they referring to? You guessed it: crisis pregnancy centers.
It’s not a coincidence that in a recent speech at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s annual gala, House Speaker Mike Johnson lauded the fake clinics for providing “comprehensive care.” In those remarks, he also talked about redirecting funds “away from big abortion and to federally qualified health centers.”
Here’s what Abortion, Every Day wrote at the time:
“We knew Planned Parenthood would be under attack under Trump—but the other half of this assault is about who replaces them. If it’s up to Republicans, it will be fake clinics that don’t offer real care—just religious ideology and shame-based bullshit.”
After all, Republicans have been going all in on crisis pregnancy centers ever since the end of Roe—positioning them as the answer to the growing reproductive and maternal health care deserts across the country. (Gaps that their laws created!) But crisis pregnancy centers don’t provide real care, and refuse to even talk about birth control—let alone prescribe it.
Read our past coverage on Republicans’ plan for fake clinics:
Shireen Shakouri, executive vice president of Reproaction, told Abortion, Every Day, “we see they’re increasingly trying to defund or make real clinics inaccessible.”
“Where do you want people to go? The available options are narrowing, all at the same time that CPCs are grabbing more and more [state funding] right now.”
There’s a reason for that: Conservatives are using the centers—which outnumber credible clinics 3:1—as their enforcement arm. Not only do the groups lie to women about their pregnancies, they harvest their personal data at a time when state surveillance and pregnancy-related criminalization are on the rise.
And if Medicaid patients in South Carolina don’t have a right to choose their health care provider, this could create a situation where they’re forced to see religious, anti-abortion providers. Consider the growing crisis of religious hospitals that have long denied pregnant patients health- and life-saving care. What happens if these hospitals and fake clinics are Medicaid patients’ only options?
That’s certainly what South Carolina Republicans had in mind: Peyton Humphreville, senior staff attorney for Planned Parenthood Federation of America noted in a press call today that the state literally pointed to crisis pregnancy centers as an alternative for Medicaid patients as part of their arguments in the Medina case.
What makes this especially dangerous is that this comes at the same time Republicans are deregulating the fake clinics to have lower standards. In fact, just this week, NBC News reported that the centers are actively discouraged from even testing for prenatal conditions and ectopic pregnancies, which are life-threatening.
The patients most impacted will also be those that are the most vulnerable. Over half of the millions of patients Planned Parenthood sees every year are covered by publicly funded programs like Medicaid.
But this goes beyond Planned Parenthood—it’s about anti-abortion legislators and activists further codifying their worldview while attacking the most marginalized among us. Shakouri says it best:
“A lot of the focus of this case has been on Planned Parenthood because they’re named, but this will affect really anyone in the state who uses Medicaid for their health provider, further entrenching people who use Medicaid as a second class.”
So much blood is on the hands of the six SCOTUS [in]justices who decided this.
Horrified by this on a daily basis. Grotesque GOP is going to hurt and kill women.