Washington state to sue over abortion policy

SEATTLE — Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Monday he will sue to challenge President Donald Trump’s new policy for taxpayer-funded family planning clinics, calling it “a transparent attack on Planned Parenthood.”

It’s the first of several legal challenges expected to be announced by Democratic-led states. A national organization representing publicly funded family planning providers said Monday it would file a separate lawsuit over the policy.

Clinics that receive money under Title X, the 1970 law designed to improve access to reproductive health care for communities around the nation, provide a wide array of services, including birth control and screening for diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases and cancer.

The new rules announced Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services would bar those clinics from making abortion referrals. They would also prohibit clinics that receive federal money from sharing office space with abortion providers — a rule that Ferguson said would force many to find new locations, undergo expensive remodels or shut down.

Ferguson said that beyond interfering in a patient’s relationship with her doctor, those rules are obstacles for women seeking abortions that would severely impair access to those clinics’ other types of medical care, especially for low-income women in rural areas.

“Rural communities currently have a shortage of health care providers,” Ferguson told reporters. “This rule will make the shortage even more acute.”

The legal moves came on the same day Senate Democrats blocked a Republican bill that would have threatened prison for doctors who don’t try to save the life of infants who are born alive during abortions. Senators voted 53-44 for the bill, which needed 60 votes to avoid delaying tactics.

Supporters of that bill said it was a vote against infanticide. Opponents, noting the rarity of such births and citing laws already making it a crime to kill newborn babies, said the bill was an unnecessary attempt for the GOP to appeal to religious conservatives and abortion opponents.

Abortion is a legal medical procedure, but federal laws prohibit the use of taxpayer funds to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman. Conservatives have long complained that Title X has been used to indirectly subsidize abortion providers.

Chris Plante, policy director of the Christian group Family Policy Institute of Washington, called the legal challenge “wrongheaded” and said the new policy “simply returns the Title X regulations back to their original legislative intent: ‘None of the funds appropriated under this title shall be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.’”

While the new rule would permit clinic staff to discuss abortion with clients, it would no longer be required that they do so along with talk of prenatal care or adoption.

“A doctor can still talk about abortion,” Plante said. “The doctor simply can’t say, ‘There’s an abortion provider three streets down, turn left.’”

If patients specifically ask for an abortion referral, staff would be required to give a list of primary care providers with no indication as to which provide abortions. The list would have to include providers who do not offer abortions, and it could not include clinics or organizations that aren’t primary care providers, such as Planned Parenthood, Ferguson said.