Last May, flying in the face of a federal rule, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed a law cutting off Medicaid funding to any facility providing abortions or affiliated with an abortion provider. Friday, U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan III blocked the law as requested in a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood. It was the latest in a series of court decisions knocking down similar laws around the country. The law went into effect July 1 but had been stayed since later that month when Jordan took the case up for review.
There are two Planned Parenthood facilities in Mississippi, one in Hattiesburg and the other in Jackson. Only the Jackson Women’s Health Organization provides abortions, but the law affects both facilities. Mississippi records show that the Hattiesburg clinic had received $439 in state funds from 2013 to 2015. That’s not a typo: $439.
The Jackson clinic has been the sole provider of abortions in the state since 2006. Mississippi officials had tried to shut it down, too, by requiring admitting privileges for physicians at the clinic. All the clinic’s physicians applied for such privileges, but no hospital would grant them. District and appellate courts ruled against that provision in 2012 and 2014. Last summer, a day after its landmark Hellerstedt ruling overturning two provisions of a Texas law—one of them being the admitting privileges requirement—the Supreme Court refused to review the lower court rulings in the Mississippi case.
The independently produced documentary Jackson tells the story of the clinic with a focus on three women—the abortion clinic’s director, the director of one of those tricksy crisis pregnancy centers, and a poor, single mother pregnant with her fifth child.
Last April, according to Emily Wagster Pettus at the Associated Press, the director of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a letter warning Medicaid agencies in every state that the law mandates that a person enrolled in Medicaid can obtain family planning services from any participating provider they choose, and that Medicaid must pay for these services even if the provider also performs abortions. Under the Hyde Amendment, no federal funds may be spent for abortions except in cases of pregnancies resulting from incest or rape or when the life of the woman is at stake.
The federal letter obviously didn’t stop Bryant from trying to add another notch in his crusade to stamp out legal abortion in Mississippi.
In his two-page order, Judge Jordan pointed out that a ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a similar Louisiana law, and that other federal courts have done the same every time they have considered such laws in other states.
In a statement, Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards said, "Yet another court has said it is unacceptable for politicians to dictate where women can go for their health care.”
But you can count on them to keep trying.