WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 08: Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issues a preliminary injunction on July 28 against section 71113 of the reconciliation bill defunding Planned Parenthood and its affiliates. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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Earlier this week, a federal district court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the whole new Congressional provision, slipped through in the “big budget bill,” to cut off Medicaid government health care contracting for Planned Parenthood and its affiliates. Its July 28 order expanded an earlier vision last week only blocking the provision as to ten affiliates not themselves performing abortions. It was highly significant for the Republican Congress to try to defund, as government health contractors, Planned Parenthood’s affiliates, and the case will have major repercussions. A review of the court’s 58 page opinion, expanding on the earlier 36 page opinion, shows the battle to be expected as the case goes on appeal.
The Court summed up, “Defendants also suggest that Congress was free to focus on ‘Big Abortion.’ But the Member healthcare providers that are defunded by Section 711113 are separate legal entities . . . . [S]ingling them out for exclusion from Medicaid on the basis of their affiliation with each other runs afoul of the First Amendment and the Bill of Attainder Clause.” (Opinion at 48.)
As the case proceeds, the challengers of the provision argue the case is not about reducing abortions. Rather, it is about singling out Planned Parenthood’s mission of providing of Medicaid health care to poor women, including advocacy of reproductive rights. On the other hand, if and when the Trump Administration takes this case beyond the court of appeals to the Supreme Court, the question is both how the 6-3 conservative majority will treat Planned Parenthood, and whether the Court will use its “shadow docket” to rule on the case with minimal due process.
The measure, section 71113, is basically the latest of a number of legislative efforts to end government health care contracting with Planned Parenthood. It was no surprise after the 2024 election that there would be another such try by President Trump and the majority Republican House and Senate. The striking approach was to evolve a series of measures that frankly described their goal as to defund uniquely Planned Parenthood, and to have it relate enough to Medicaid spending that it could go aboard a budget bill that did not require 60 votes to get past a Senate filibuster – an impassable barrier to any ordinary measure to defund Planned Parenthood.