The Supreme Court Just Gutted Planned Parenthood Funding
The Supreme Court just issued its worst ruling for women since Dobbs.
In a 6-3 decision Thursday, the nation’s highest judiciary ruled against Planned Parenthood, deciding that the health care organization could not sue South Carolina over the state’s defunding effort.
The court ruled that Medicaid recipients effectively do not have the right to choose their health care provider, granting states the ability to refuse to cover Medicaid expenses at Planned Parenthood sites.
The ruling in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic spells certain disaster for the national organization, setting a precedent for states across the country to strip funding from a nonprofit that does not use public funds to provide abortion care, and provides many other critical services such as physicals, cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control access.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, arguing that the law does not include the “rights-creating language” that would allow patients to sue states when their provider choice is restricted.
It’s the third time that South Carolina’s defunding case has reached the Supreme Court. The state initially moved to cut Planned Parenthood off of Medicaid funding in 2018. In 2020, the court rejected the state’s appeal. Three years later, the justices intervened in a lower court’s ruling, ordering it to reconsider the case after a relevant ruling had been issued by the nine-judge bench.
South Carolina has one of the most prohibitive abortion policies in the nation, restricting access after just six weeks, before most individuals know they’re pregnant and just one week before drug store pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy hormones in their earliest, and least reliable, window.
Planned Parenthood has said it gets less than $100,000 per year in South Carolina, and that Medicaid does not pay for abortions except in emergency events that compromise a pregnant person’s life or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
The court’s three progressive justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson arguing that the court was effectively unravelling a landmark Reconstruction-era civil rights law.
Section 1983 of the United States Code, enacted in 1871, enabled Americans to bring suits in federal court to enforce their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from depriving persons of due process and equal protection of the law.
After a 1961 case leveraged the code to charge Chicago police officers with violating a family’s constitutional rights, “Section 1983 became the primary vehicle for enforcing constitutional rights in the United States,” former Senator and Judge Lynn Adelman wrote for Dissent Magazine in 2018, noting that the impact of the code’s interpretation by the Warren Court has been a central pillar of constitutional enforcement around the country: “Private litigants file more than 15,000 Section 1983 actions every year and prisoners file more than 30,000,” he wrote.
The code has been utilized to fight against excessive force, racial profiling, wrongful convictions, and other instances in which officials violate an individual’s constitutional rights. But as of Thursday, the code may no longer apply to Americans’ ability to choose their healthcare provider.
In her dissenting opinion, Jackson wrote that the ruling “is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.”
“It will strip 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,” she said. “The Court today disregards Congress’s express desire to prevent that very outcome.”
This story has been updated.
