The Senate will take its first vote Monday afternoon to
defund Planned Parenthood. That will be a procedural vote to move to debate on the bill and it's highly unlikely to receive the 60 votes it needs. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have to get every Republican and six Democrats to back the idea, and that's not going to happen. But it doesn't mean this will be the end of the defunding battle. Despite the fact that McConnell has a mess of senators running for reelection in tough states—Kelly Ayotte (NH), Ron Johnson (WI), and Mark Kirk (IL) among them—who would rather not have to take on this fight, he can't control those in his caucus who want it. Today's vote will not satisfy them, or the anti-choice extremists who have called the shots in the Republican party for more than a decade now.
The big challenge they've got is that defunding Planned Parenthood means taking away Medicaid funding for it. Funding, by the way, that cannot be used for abortions. About 75 percent of the organization's funding comes through the program for covering low-income women. Another pot comes from Title X family planning programs, which would be relatively easy for Congress to cut. That Medicaid money, though, has been already protected by the courts when states have tried to defund, and that would almost certainly be the case with a new federal effort as well.
Attorneys interviewed said Medicaid law has long protected a patient’s right to flexibility in choosing a health care provider (as long as the doctor, clinic or other provider accepts Medicaid). Those safeguards are particularly strong for access to family planning services, said Cindy Mann, an attorney with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips who until recently ran Medicaid for the Obama administration. […]
Ten states have cut family planning funds, according to the Guttmacher Institute. They include Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin.
Yet when several states tried to pull Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood clinics, courts sided with Planned Parenthood and its backers, and stopped all or part of defunding bids in Tennessee, Indiana, Arizona and North Carolina. […]
“The cases where states have tried to take away Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood have all failed in one way or another,” said Susan Fogel, director of reproductive health for the National Health Law Program. […]
If Congress bars a qualified clinic from participating in Medicaid by pulling its funding, Fogel said it’s likely to be considered discriminatory against the clinics.
The forced-birth advocates, of course, want to take this to the courts. They want to take every aspect of legal abortion to the courts—even when it's not abortion. Even when it's just women's health. And here we get to the heart of the War on Women. Fighting Planned Parenthood, trying to limit Medicaid, it's not about protecting the lives of the unborn. It's about controlling women.