The Supreme Court ruled that Planned Parenthood and one of its patients may not sue South Carolina over its effort to deny funding to Planned Parenthood, 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.”
Medicaid gives federal money to states to provide medical care for poor people, but it sets some conditions. One is that eligible participants may receive assistance from any provider qualified to perform the required services.
Abortions are banned in South Carolina after six weeks of pregnancy. Even then, federal law prohibits the use of Medicaid funding for abortion except in life-threatening circumstances or in cases of rape or incest. But Planned Parenthood clinics in Charleston and Columbia provide services unrelated to abortion, including counseling, physical exams, contraception and screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted infections.
Planned Parenthood and a patient who sought contraception sued under a federal civil rights law, and a federal trial judge blocked the South Carolina directive, saying that it ran afoul of Medicaid’s requirement that patients may choose any qualified provider.
The litigation that followed was convoluted and circuitous, focusing largely on whether Medicaid’s provision created a right that individuals could enforce by filing lawsuits. The Supreme Court has said that federal laws like Medicaid, which give money to states but only if they accept certain conditions, must “unambiguously confer individual federal rights” to give affected individuals the right to sue.
That is a hard test to meet, and the court has only rarely ruled that it has been satisfied, most recently in 2023 in Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County v. Talevski, a case concerning nursing homes. The statute at issue in that case repeatedly referred to “rights” as such, while the Medicaid provision in the new case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, No. 23-1275, uses different language.
That law says that people seeking medical services “may obtain such assistance from any institution” that is “qualified to perform the service or services required.”
Last year, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., ruled that the suit could proceed.
“This case is, and always has been, about whether Congress conferred an individually enforceable right for Medicaid beneficiaries to freely choose their health care provider,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote for the panel. “Preserving access to Planned Parenthood and other providers means preserving an affordable choice and quality care for an untold number of mothers and infants in South Carolina.”
He added that “this decision is not about funding or providing abortions.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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