The Planned Parenthood abortion business is fighting Arkansas again in an effort to continue receiving taxpayer dollars.
Arkansas moved to strip the abortion chain of taxpayer dollars in 2015 after undercover videos exposed Planned Parenthood’s baby body parts trade. Planned Parenthood sued, but in November, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a victory to the state.
Now, the Planned Parenthood affiliate in Arkansas is trying again. The abortion chain submitted new arguments to a federal judge Friday asking her to block the state from cutting off Medicaid funds to its Arkansas facilities, Arkansas Online reports.
U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker is the same judge who blocked the state’s actions in 2015 and 2016. A panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals later disagreed, ruling that the state may block Medicaid funding to the abortion group.
Here’s more from the report:
In a memorandum filed Friday asking Baker to consider an injunction based on the constitutional claims in the lawsuit, attorneys for Planned Parenthood argued that the 8th Circuit didn’t consider whether the state likely violated the Medicaid Act, “but reversed solely because it found that individual Medicaid beneficiaries … have no private right of action to enforce their Free Choice of Provider rights.” …
The motion says the Arkansas clinics — one each in Little Rock and Fayetteville — and their patients will suffer “irreparable injury” without an injunction.
The abortion chain alleges that the state’s actions “both violate the equal protection rights of [Planned Parenthood] and [the clinics’ Medicaid patients in Arkansas], and unconstitutionally punish [Planned Parenthood Great Plains] for the exercise of its constitutional rights.”
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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 frees up money in the abortion chain’s budget to promote and perform abortions.
Late last year, Judd Deere, a spokesman for state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, emphasized to the Democrat Gazette the importance of states being allowed to cut of tax dollars to groups engaging in unethical practices.
The 8th Circuit Court ruling “reaffirms that Planned Parenthood and the three patients it recruited could not contest in federal court Arkansas’s determination that a medical provider has engaged in misconduct that merits disqualification from the Medicaid program,” Deere said in November.
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 body parts.
Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion business in the United States, performing more than 320,000 abortions on unborn babies every year. Its most recent annual report showed a record income of $1.46 billion, with about half a billion dollars coming from taxpayers.
