U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas criticized his fellow justices Monday for refusing to do their job when they rejected a case about state efforts to defund the abortion giant Planned Parenthood.
On Monday, six of the nine justices refused to take two cases out of Kansas and Louisiana where lower courts refused to allow the states to defund the nation’s biggest abortion business.
Both states, and several others, moved to revoke taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood after videos exposed the abortion giant allegedly selling the body parts of aborted babies. Planned Parenthood sued the states, and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Kansas cannot defund Planned Parenthood, despite an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into its aborted baby body parts trade.
Then, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a similar effort by Arkansas to defund the abortion chain in 2017. Because of the circuit split, pro-life groups thought Supreme Court would take up the case.
Thomas said the court made a “mess” of the matter, and blamed the other justices for not wanting to touch a case involving the abortion giant Planned Parenthood.
“What explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood,’” Thomas wrote in his dissenting opinion.
Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch joined Thomas, but Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the four liberal justices in refusing to hear the case.
Thomas said he was particularly troubled by the majority decision, because the case has nothing to do with abortion. Instead, it is about Medicaid and patients’ rights.
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“It is true that these particular cases arose after several States alleged that Planned Parenthood affiliates had, among other things, engaged in ‘the illegal sale of fetal organs’ and ‘fraudulent billing practices,’ and thus removed Planned Parenthood as a state Medicaid provider,” Thomas wrote.
“But these cases are not about abortion rights,” he continued. “They are about private rights of action under the Medicaid Act. Resolving the question presented here would not even affect Planned Parenthood’s ability to challenge the States’ decisions.”
“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty,” Thomas concluded.
Americans United for Life President Catherine Glenn Foster echoed Thomas’s disappointment. The pro-life legal group filed two friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Louisiana and Kansas.
“We join the dissent in calling on the Court to ‘do its duty,’” Foster said. “But the good news is that there are other similar cases pending in lower courts, which may give the Supreme Court another opportunity to decide this important issue. In the meantime, AUL will continue to fight to protect states from being forced to use their limited public funds to subsidize abortion businesses.”
In Louisiana in 2015, a federal judge temporarily blocked the state’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, allowing the taxpayer funding to continue flowing to the abortion chain. Later, the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the judge’s order, the AP reports.
In its lawsuit, Planned Parenthood accused the de-funding effort of being “politically motivated” and claimed that it would cut off women’s access to health care. Even though hundreds of other health care options exist for the small number of women who get non-abortion health care at Planned Parenthood, the judges agreed with Planned Parenthood’s claim that de-funding it would somehow strip them of their health care.
In August 2015, former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal canceled a state contract with Planned Parenthood that provided the abortion company with family planning funding through Medicaid. Planned Parenthood quickly sued to block the move.
After the expose showed Planned Parenthood selling aborted babies, Jindal said: “In recent weeks, it has been shocking to see reports of the alleged activities taking place at Planned Parenthood facilities across the country. Planned Parenthood does not represent the values of the people of Louisiana and shows a fundamental disrespect for human life. It has become clear that this is not an organization that is worthy of receiving public assistance from the state.”
The expose videos catching Planned Parenthood officials selling the body parts of aborted babies have shocked the nation. Here is a list of all 14:
- In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
- In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.
- In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.
- In the fourth video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde stated, “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”
- In the fifth video: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasted of Planned Parenthood’s skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”
- In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”
- In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.”
- In the eighth video: StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits Planned Parenthood sells “a lot of” fully intact aborted babies.
- The ninth video: catches a Planned Parenthood medical director discussing how the abortion company sells fully intact aborted babies — including one who “just fell out” of the womb.
- The 10th video: catches the nation’s biggest abortion business selling specific body parts — including the heart, eyes and “gonads” of unborn babies. The video also shows the shocking ways in which Planned Parenthood officials admit that they are breaking federal law by selling aborted baby body parts for profit.
- Unreleased Videos: Unreleased videos from CMP show Deb Vanderhei of Planned Parenthood caught on tape talking about how Planned Parenthood abortion business affiliates may “want to increase revenue [from selling baby parts] but we can’t stop them…” Another video has a woman talking about the “financial incentives” of selling aborted baby body parts.
- The 11th video: catches a Texas Planned Parenthood abortionist planning to sell the intact heads of aborted babies for research. Amna Dermish is caught on tape describing an illegal partial-birth abortion procedure to terminate living, late-term unborn babies which she hopes will yield intact fetal heads for brain harvesting.
- The 12th video in the series shows new footage of Jennefer Russo, medical director at Planned Parenthood in Orange County, California, describing to undercover investigators how her abortion business tries to harvest intact aborted babies’ bodies for a local for-profit biotech company and changes the abortion procedure to do so.
- The 13th video: exposes a Planned Parenthood medical director admitting that babies born alive after abortion are sometimes killed.
- The 14th video: catches Planned Parenthood executives discussing gruesome abortion procedures and the sale of body parts from aborted babies for profit.
