The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Planned Parenthood and one of its patients cannot sue South Carolina over its effort to deny funding to the group, reasoning that the relevant federal statute does not authorize such suits.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.
In 2018, Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, ordered state officials to deny Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood, saying that “payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life.”
But abortion was mentioned only in passing in the decision, and the patient in the case had sought access to contraception, not an abortion.
Instead, the justices focused on whether the plaintiffs were entitled to sue to enforce part of the Medicaid law, which gives federal money to states to provide medical care for poor people.
Michele Goodwin, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Really Care About Originalism. ‘Medina v. Planned Parenthood’ Just Proved It
The Supreme Court delivered a stinging blow for basic healthcare on Thursday: In a 6-3 decision, along ideological lines, the Court allowed a harmful executive order from South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), originally signed in 2018, to stand. The executive order—part of an ongoing attack on reproductive freedom—allowed denying Medicaid funding to providers that deliver abortion services. The EO took aim at the state’s two Planned Parenthood clinics.***
The case is part of the ongoing attack on reproductive freedom, which predates even Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
For decades, antiabortion advocates and elected officials have used targeted regulations of abortion providers—otherwise known as TRAP laws—to eliminate abortion through indirect means, creating financial ultimatums: Stop providing abortion services in order to receive funding for breast cancer screenings, prenatal care, postnatal care, ovarian cancer screenings and pregnancy testing for poor women … or lose critical funding. Both leave poor women in a lurch.
This Supreme Court decision weaponizes poor women’s poverty against them.
Ian Millhiser, Vox, The Supreme Court's Disastrous New Abortion Decision, Explained
On Thursday, however, the Republican justices ruled, in Medina v. Planned Parenthood, that Medicaid patients may not choose their health provider. And then they went much further. Thursday’s decision radically reorders all of federal Medicaid law, rendering much of it unenforceable. Medina could prove to be one of the most consequential health care decisions of the last several years, and one of the deadliest, as it raises a cloud of doubt over countless laws requiring that certain people receive health coverage, as well as laws ensuring that they will receive a certain quality of care.