Arkansas taxpayers won a victory Wednesday when a federal appeals court ruled that the state can defund the abortion business Planned Parenthood.
Pro-life lawmakers in Arkansas tried to defund the abortion chain of Medicaid dollars in 2015 after a series of undercover videos showed Planned Parenthood potentially illegally selling aborted baby body parts.
Three Planned Parenthood patients challenged the decision, and a lower court judge blocked it. However, the state appealed, and 8th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the block on Wednesday, allowing the state to cut off funds to the abortion chain, The Hill reports.
Here’s more from the Washington Examiner:
The appeals court found that the patients didn’t have a federal right to sue to keep Planned Parenthood funded. It found that the Medicaid provision to offer quality health plans is directed only at the federal agency charged with approving state Medicaid plans.
It added that Planned Parenthood can appeal the state’s defunding decision.
The abortion chain’s Great Plains affiliate, which includes Arkansas, indicated that it may challenge the ruling.
“This is not over,” said local Planned Parenthood leader Raegan McDonald-Mosley in a statement. “We will do everything in our power to protect our patients’ access to birth control cancer screenings, and other lifesaving care.”
SIGN THE PETITION! Congress Must De-Fund Planned Parenthood Immediately
In 2015, Planned Parenthood received more than $51,000 in taxpayer-funded Medicaid payments in Arkansas. Even though the funding does not go to abortions directly, it is fungible and frees up money to promote and perform abortions.
When the state defunded the abortion business in 2015, Gov. Asa Hutchinson expressed his outrage at the abortion chain’s barbaric practices.
“It is apparent that after the recent revelations on the actions of Planned Parenthood, that this organization does not represent the values of the people of our state and Arkansas is better served by terminating any and all existing contracts with them. This includes their affiliated organization, Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma,” Hutchinson said at the time.
In a statement, Hutchinson said he was ending their contracts after videos surfaced showing top Planned Parenthood executives haggling over the price of aborted babies’ body parts, admitting to altering abortion procedures to procure better organs for harvesting and casually discussing ways their doctors can “crush” unborn babies to obtain fully intact parts.
Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion business in the United States, performing more than 300,000 abortions on unborn babies every year. At the federal level, lawmakers also are trying to defund it of approximately half a billion taxpayer dollars annually.
