Mother Jones - The Supreme Court’s Christmas Gift to Religious-Right Lawyers

The justices agreed to weigh in on defunding Planned Parenthood at the request of a powerful conservative Christian legal group.

Madison Pauly
51 minutes ago

The Supreme Court agreed last week to hear a case that could pave the way for states to kick Planned Parenthood clinics and affiliated doctors out of their Medicaid programs. The case threatens the ability of the nation’s largest family planning organization to provide their low-income patients with birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment—services that have nothing to do with abortion.

Back in June, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the religious-right legal group behind the fall of Roe v. Wade, legal attacks on the abortion pill, and some of the most important anti-LGBTQ laws and Supreme Court cases of recent memory, filed the request that the nine justices hear this case.

They asked on behalf of their client, the South Carolina health department. That is part of a pattern: ADF has increasingly represented state governments in efforts to defend abortion bans and anti-trans laws. My colleague Pema Levy reported earlier this year that this work has raised ethical questions about how a religious organization that brings in over $100 million annually from mostly undisclosed donors can represent the public in court while also advancing a religious agenda.

The case, known as Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, dates back to the summer of 2018, when South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster ordered his state’s health department to declare any doctors or clinics who provided abortion “unqualified” to offer other family planning services. McMaster’s order didn’t have anything to do with the doctors’ resumes or the quality of their healthcare. Instead it was calculated to punish Planned Parenthood financially by making it ineligible to receive Medicaid reimbursements for the non-abortion services that, contrary to popular misconception, make up the vast majority of its work. Medicaid, which provides health coverage for people who are low-income, already does not cover abortion—a prohibition that has been federal law for decades. But “the payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life,” McMaster reasoned in his executive order.

Politically, the executive order was a way for McMaster to “take an anti-abortion stand,” per the resulting headlines. But practically, it hurt South Carolinian women on Medicaid who relied on their local Planned Parenthood clinic for everyday reproductive healthcare.

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