The states launched an unprecedented attack against Planned Parenthood in their 2011 legislative sessions, Eighteen states have passed one or more measures to limit the services the family planning provider can offer. Planned Parenthood is battling back in the courts. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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Eighteen states have passed one or more measures to limit the services the family planning provider can offer. Four are already facing Planned Parenthood in what promise to be lengthy and expensive legal battles to defend their right to enact those laws.
Legislators in five states — Indiana, North Carolina, Kansas, Wisconsin and Texas — defunded Planned Parenthood in 2011 because some of its clinics provide privately funded abortions. Planned Parenthood attorneys challenged three of those laws in court this summer, and judges in all three states — Indiana, North Carolina and Kansas — temporarily blocked their enforcement, unanimously ruling that state governments may not punish a particular health provider for offering a legal, constitutionally protected medical service.
“If all of the judges are saying the same thing that we have been saying in all of these defunding battles, there really is very little doubt that it is illegal under many federal funding streams and unconstitutional to disqualify us from participating in these government programs,” said Roger Evans, Planned Parenthood’s attorney on the North Carolina case.
Whether the states will take these rulings seriously is a different question, Evans told HuffPost. All three states are appealing the court decisions. Kansas is dragging its feet on restoring funding to Planned Parenthood despite having been ordered to do so immediately by a federal judge. Despite the first injunction against a defunding law — in Indiana — other states, such as Wisconsin and Ohio, moved forward with their own legislation.
“Litigation has not deterred the legislative and public support for these bills,” said Mailee Smith, staff counsel for the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life.
Evans of Planned Parenthood predicted that many conservative state lawmakers will continue to push defunding legislation to “play to an extremist base to which they feel obligated to throw some red meat” even though they know the state will likely have to spend large amounts of taxpayer money and resources trying to defend that law in court. The Kansas state government, for instance, stirred up controversy among its taxpayers when the attorney general hired expensive outside counsel — the same private firm that has represented the billionaire Koch brothers — to handle its suit against Planned Parenthood.
