USA TODAY International Edition
Planned Parenthood fights GOP fund cuts
Chapters in 15 states mobilize to keep Medicaid money
AUSTIN Planned Parenthood chapters nationwide are fighting efforts in at least 15 states to cut them out of tens of millions of dollars they receive under the federal Medicaid program for reproductive health care.
That federal money doesn’t cover abortions, but the highstakes fights being waged in statehouses and courthouses are meant to choke off the flow of taxpayers’ dollars to the country’s largest abortion provider.
Planned Parenthood has been in the crosshairs of Republican officeholders for nearly a decade. The spotlight on the organization intensified significantly in 2015 when undercover videos surfaced suggesting the organization sought to sell organs and tissue from aborted fetuses as a fundraising tool.
Planned Parenthood argued that the videos were selectively edited and that unedited footage shows the executive telling activists, who were posing as researchers, that any sale of tissue and organs was not a “revenue stream.”
The issue became fuel for politicians, magnified in the 2016 presidential election cycle.
Most of the Medicaid money comes from Washington, but it’s up to states to pay clinics and physicians for providing care to patients who are poor, many living in rural communities with limited access to health care.
In Texas, both sides of the debate over reproductive rights anxiously await a federal judge’s decision this month. Planned Parenthood sued the state last year when it made plans to cut $ 3 million a year in Medicaid money for the organization.
“Medicaid reimburses Planned Parenthood for services like cervical cancer screening, birth control and testing for sexually transmitted diseases,” said Sarah Wheat, spokeswoman for the Texas chapter of the national organization whose roots date back a full century. “Medicaid does not pay for abortion. It’s against the law.”
The action that prompted the lawsuit in Texas, just like legislative initiatives and litigation pending in numerous states across the nation and in Congress, is part of a far- reaching effort led by Republicans.
The Iowa Senate passed legislation, with no Democratic votes, that would deny public money to any organization that provides abortion services.
In Virginia, the state House passed a measure by a nearly 2- 1 ratio this month that would strip Planned Parenthood of its Medicaid eligibility.
At the Women’s March in the nation’s capital in January, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said the organization plans to fight back, no matter the cost. “We’re not going to take this lying down, and we will not go back,” Richards told thousands of people.
Abortion opponents said public opinion momentum is on their side. “The right- to- life movement continues to see evidence that our efforts to educate our nation about the unborn child’s humanity and our efforts to enact protective pro- life legislation are having a tremendous impact in moving our nation away from Roe and Doe’s deadly legacy,” Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said in a statement.