Planned Parenthood Seeks Supreme Court Overturn of HHS Rule Barring Abortion Facilities, Referral Sites From Title X Funding
WASHINGTON — The American Medical Association, along with the abortion and contraception giant Planned Parenthood, have filed an appeals petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to overturn new Health and Human Services (HHS) rules that resulted in Planned Parenthood losing federal Title X funds.
“Millions of people have depended on Title X since its inception, receiving critical family planning and sexual health care each year. And under a long-settled regulatory framework, the Title X program has been a resounding success,” the writ of certiorari reads.
“For 50 years, grants to reproductive health care providers have dramatically reduced unintended-pregnancy and abortion rates and have provided low-income individuals millions of screenings for [cervical] cancer, sexually transmitted infections, and HIV,” it states. “The rule reverses that progress and hobbles the program.”
As previously reported, the organizations had sued in March 2019 after HHS announced its intention to revert to the 1988 standard under the Reagan administration, which disqualified family planning organizations from receiving Title X funds if abortions are performed in the same building where contraceptives and other family planning services are offered.
The change meant that abortion providers would either have to divide their services into two separate physical locations, or lose funding.
“This rule will require Title X providers to maintain physical and financial separation from locations which provide abortion as a method of family planning,” a document released by HHS outlined.
“This physical and financial separation will ensure compliance with the statutory requirement that Title X funding not support programs where abortion is a method of family planning — and is consistent with the plain text of Section 1008, legislative history, and case law,” it stated.
The rule change also removed a requirement under the Clinton administration to refer for abortions. However, not only are recipients now not mandated to refer, but they are completely prohibited from doing so. Title X grantees also may not “perform, promote, or support abortion as a method of family planning.”
Planned Parenthood declined to conform to the requirements and rather chose to lose its funding. It also decided to sue to challenge the regulations.
While federal judges Washington, Oregon and California had struck down the HHS rules, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in June 2019 that the lower courts had not sufficiently analyzed certain aspects of the case and opined that the Trump administration was likely to win the legal challenge.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, blocked the HHS regulations, stating that prohibiting entities from referring mothers for an abortion “quite clearly ‘interferes with communications’ about medical options between a patient and her provider.”
Therefore, the American Medical Association and Planned Parenthood, among others, have appealed to the Supreme Court to resolve the issue. The groups similarly argued that the rules are unnecessarily restrictive, go further than the original 1980’s mandate and prefer prenatal care over the abortion option.
“Under the rule, if a patient tells her provider that she wants an abortion, the provider must refuse to provide her a referral and instead must provide a referral for care she neither needs nor requested — information about prenatal care,” the writ of certiorari reads. “This necessarily steers a patient toward carrying a pregnancy to term against the patient’s wishes.”
“[E]ven when a patient specifically requests information about abortion only, practitioners must disregard the patient’s decision. If a practitioner provides any information about abortion, then the patient must also be counseled about other options she does not want and must be told about the ‘risks and side effects to … [the] unborn child,’” it states.
As previously reported, while modern-day Planned Parenthood leaders ardently argue that abortion is a mother’s “right,” the organization’s feminist founder, Margaret Sanger, actually wrote against abortion, stating that “the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
“The great majority of women … belong to the working class. Nearly all of these women will fall into one of two general groups — the ones who are having children against their wills, and those who, to escape this evil, find refuge in abortion. Being given their choice by society — to continue to be overburdened mothers or to submit to a humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous operation, those women in whom the feminine urge to freedom is strongest choose the abortionist,” she remarked in her book “Woman and the New Race.”
However, Sanger’s solution to countering abortion was birth control, initially naming her organization the American Birth Control League. She was also a proponent of eugenics against the physically and mentally disabled, using birth control to prevent undesirables from reproducing and to keep healthy women from producing large families.
“The question that society must answer is this: Shall family limitation be achieved through birth control or abortion? Shall normal, safe, effective contraceptives be employed, or shall we continue to force women to the abnormal, often dangerous surgical operation?” Sanger asked.
According to Planned Parenthood’s latest annual report, the organization performed a record number of abortions during the 2018-2019 fiscal year, as 345,672 babies were murdered in their mother’s womb, up 12,915 from the year prior and up 24,288 from two years ago. Government funding was also at a record high, as Planned Parenthood received over $616 million in reimbursements and grants.
Proverbs 6:16-17 states that God hates “hands that shed innocent blood.” Ecclesiastes 11:5 says, “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God, who maketh all.”
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