ACLJ Will File Amicus Brief Urging Supreme Court to Hear Case Involving State Decision to Defund and Disqualify Planned Parenthood as a Medicaid Service Provider

Next month, the ACLJ will be filing a friend-of-the-court brief at the Supreme Court in an important case involving the states’ prerogative to defund Planned Parenthood.

If the high Court decides to hear the case – Baker v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic – the decision could have a dramatic impact on the ability of the states to stop the flow of taxpayer dollars to the nation’s largest abortion provider.

Here’s the background: In 2018, South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, issued an executive order directing the South Carolina Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) to deem abortion clinics unqualified to receive Medicaid funding.

Planned Parenthood and an individual plaintiff immediately sued in federal court, challenging the State’s decision. The district court enjoined the executive order and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. South Carolina has now sought review in the Supreme Court.

Last term, we told you how we filed an amicus brief in a similar case in Louisiana in support of the state’s decision to disqualify Planned Parenthood as a provider of healthcare services to Medicaid patients. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court denied review in that case over the dissent of three conservative Justices.

Perhaps this time, enough Justices will see that it is essential to resolve the important legal issues raised in this case.

Our brief will argue that the Court should grant review because the Fourth Circuit misread the Medicaid Act and analyzed the statutory issues apart from any consideration of the federalism concerns raised when the federal government tells a sovereign state how it must allocate its taxpayer funds.

This is a very important case that could strike a devastating blow against the abortion purveyor.

In the last year, the ACLJ helped to deliver another “devastating” defeat to Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses through a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule blocking millions from abortion providers.

And it wasn’t just us. At our request, ACLJ members took action, submitting an astonishing 13,000+ individual comments, accounting for more than 10% of all comments received by HHS.

Our combined voices were too strong to be ignored. We also filed amicus briefs all the way to the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and now Planned Parenthood has been defunded of as much at $60 million of your taxpayer dollars through Title X.

Now states are trying to defund Planned Parenthood, and we’re preparing to file a critical amicus brief at the Supreme Court in the coming weeks.

Together we can defund Planned Parenthood and taxpayer funded abortion on-demand. But we need you. Sign on to our brief before our filing deadline at the Supreme Court.