A federal judge on Monday blocked components of the “big, beautiful bill” that would effectively defund Planned Parenthood.
The new order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani states that the federal government must continue to reimburse Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the country, despite federal efforts to nix the health care provider’s funding via recent legislation. The decision expands on a preliminary injunction, issued last week, that narrowly applied to affiliates in states where abortion was legal and where services did not exceed an $800,000 revenue threshold.
“Patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable,” Talwani wrote in her Monday order, rejecting the language of the bill on the grounds of the First Amendment. “In particular, restricting Members’ ability to provide healthcare services threatens an increase in unintended pregnancies and attendant complications because of reduced access to effective contraceptives, and an increase in undiagnosed and untreated STIs.”
The order gives the green light to patients using Medicaid to continue to seek services at Planned Parenthood.
Talwani specified that the court was not intervening in the federal government’s capacity to regulate abortion and was not ordering the public funding of elective abortion services. Instead, the order blocks the federal government from excluding specific groups from Medicaid reimbursements when they are legally entitled to them, and when their lawsuit has an overwhelming likelihood of success.
Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, but that’s not the only service it offers. The nonprofit additionally provides critical services such as physicals, cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control access, and it does not use public funds to provide abortion care.
Donald Trump’s tax bill will gut $880 billion from Medicaid and other crucial social programs—a detail so little favored by Americans that conservative lawmakers stopped holding town halls due to their constituents’ staunch opposition to the line item. But neither that nor the fact that the legislation is estimated to add upward of $6 trillion to the debt stopped Republicans from passing it through Congress, ushering Trump’s key agenda item to his desk.
Shortly after Trump signed the tax bill into law, Planned Parenthood filed suit, arguing that the conservative initiative had specifically targeted its practice in hopes of punishing Americans who either provide or seek abortion care.
“The prohibition specifically targets Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its member health care providers in order to punish them for lawful activity, namely advocating for and providing legal abortion access wholly outside the Medicaid program and without using any federal funds,” Planned Parenthood wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed in Boston federal court last week.
Reacting to Talwani’s most recent order, Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon told The Hill that the Trump administration “strongly disagrees” with the court’s decision.
“States should not be forced to fund organizations that have chosen political advocacy over patient care,” Nixon said in a statement. “This ruling undermines state flexibility and disregards longstanding concerns about accountability.”
The post Planned Parenthood Scores Massive Win Against Trump’s Cruel Budget appeared first on New Republic.
