Planned Parenthood under scrutiny

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 3rd of April.

Thank you for listening to WORLD Radio! Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Up first, taxpayer dollars and abortions.

Thousands rallied in front of the Supreme Court yesterday… pro-lifers on one side, supporters of abortion giant Planned Parenthood on the other. Inside the court, the justices heard arguments in a case out of South Carolina.

BROWN: Back in 2018, South Carolina barred Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, saying the organization violates state policy because abortion is a major part of what it does. Planned Parenthood sued, and a lower court sided with it.

Now the Supreme Court will decide: Can individual Medicaid recipients override a state’s decision about which providers receive public funding?

REICHARD: We will cover the legal arguments in Monday’s Legal Docket, but today, what the case means for Americans who showed up to make their voices heard.

Here’s WORLD reporter Josh Schumacher.

SOUND: [Chatter ahead of rally]

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Mayra Rodriguez worked for Planned Parenthood for 17 years in Arizona.

MAYRA RODRIGUEZ: I once came to D.C. to advocate for them not to be defunded, right? I told people, hey, no, we do more than abortions, but the reality is that Planned Parenthood's only concentration, it's abortion.

After she became facilities director, Rodriguez discovered some troubling things.

RODRIGUEZ: I saw how those facilities were misusing the funds, our tax money, they were misbilling insurance to commit fraud purposely.

She reported the mismanagement, as well as harm to women receiving abortions, but instead of fixing the problems, her employer fired her.

RODRIGUEZ: A multi-billion dollar organization is not for the people. They're a corporation.

The Supreme Court is considering whether patients have the right to sue South Carolina for disqualifying Planned Parenthood. But supporters and opponents of the company are debating a more fundamental question: Does the organization provide qualified medical care?

CHELSEA ALIONAR: It supports basic preventative care. We're not talking abortions.

Chelsea Alianor works with the group Rise and Resist in Oregon. She says the years-long case about funding Planned Parenthood is now connected to efforts by the Trump administration to cut back Medicaid.

ALIONAR: We're talking about 30 million Americans who potentially will go without health insurance, it's not okay.

On Monday, the Trump administration paused grants for family planning services while it investigates how the funds are being spent.

Another volunteer, Shayna Nash, told WORLD she regularly goes to Planned Parenthood for cancer screening pap smears.

SHAYNA NASH: I'd rather go to somebody who I trust and believes in the same things I do, so I have all my life, you know, tend to go to a Planned Parenthood facility. In a lot of rural communities, Planned Parenthood is typically the only facility in the area that provides reproductive or sexual health care.

But others say the math tells a different story.

HANNAH LAPE: There are 600 Planned Parenthoods in the United States…but there are 19,000 federally qualified health centers that don't offer abortions…

Hannah Lape leads a chapter of Students for Life at Wheaton College in Illinois. She points out that Planned Parenthood is far from the only option available for many communities.

LAPE: So I think we should be focusing on shifting our attention and our funding to those federally qualified health centers that already exist and are already funded by the government. We don’t need Planned Parenthood.

In South Carolina’s brief, Health Department Director Eunice Medina points out that there are 140 federally qualified health clinics in her state, but only two Planned Parenthood affiliates. And they don’t provide a variety of the preventative services proponents say they do. So blocking funds will not substantially reduce access to services like breast exams and STD testing. Add to that Planned Parenthood’s track record of questionable business practices.

MAT STAVER: The fact of the matter is this provider is unqualified because of its lurid history with regards to this human trafficking of aborted baby body parts.

Mat Staver is Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel, a non-profit law firm and ministry focused on issues of life, family, and religious freedom. His firm represented investigative reporter Sandra Merritt after her 2015 exposé on the sale of baby body parts landed her in court.

STAVER: As a result of Sandra Merritt's undercover documentary, there were several states in the country that began to defund Planned Parenthood, the first of which was Texas. And there is a case that was actually upheld by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, citing specifically the videos of Sandra Merritt and David DeLyden with regards to Planned Parenthood.

California reached a deal to drop criminal charges against Merritt earlier this year. Now Liberty Counsel has submitted a friend of the court brief supporting South Carolina.

STAVER: There's a lot of reasons why Planned Parenthood is not qualified and that South Carolina is correct in saying that Planned Parenthood cannot be a qualified provider for the state's Medicaid funds.

The law authorizing Medicaid says states will provide federal and state funds for low-income patients to receive care from any qualified provider. Planned Parenthood argues that patients have the right to sue the government for blocking funds from going to the provider of their choosing. But South Carolina and supporters like Staver say no such right exists in the law.

STAVER: The statute needs to give you that and explicitly grant that kind of right for an individual or an individual entity to sue. Absent that, you can't just simply infer that everybody has this individual right to sue.

Even so, the courts are split on whether states can block Medicaid funds from going to the abortion provider.

STAVER: There are five courts of appeal that say Planned Parenthood should win. There are two courts of appeal that say no, the state should win. That's why I think the Supreme Court took up this case.

SOUND: [Chanting outside the court.]

Planned Parenthood’s supporters outnumbered pro-life advocates in front of the court on Wednesday. But advocates like former facility director Rodriguez are hopeful the court—and lawmakers—will put Planned Parenthood on notice.

RODRIGUEZ: They're not only misusing our tax money in our country, but they use it to kill babies in every other country, too. So it's time for us to say enough.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher in Washington.

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