12 States Sue Joe Biden for Forcing Americans to Fund Planned Parenthood

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Oct 26, 2021   |   9:34AM   |   Washington, DC

State leaders are fighting back against President Joe Biden’s new rule forcing taxpayers to fund the billion-dollar abortion chain Planned Parenthood.

On Monday, 12 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging Biden’s rule for the Title X family planning program, saying taxpayer-funded family planning clinics should be physically and financially independent of abortion facilities, the Washington Times reports.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who led the lawsuit, said they want to restore the 2019 rules President Donald Trump’s administration put in place to ensure that tax dollars are not being used to support abortions.

“You can’t ‘follow the money’ when all the money is dumped into one pot and mixed together,” Yost said in a statement. “Federal law prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion — and that law means nothing if the federal money isn’t kept separate. That, frankly, is the real reason behind the rule.”

Title X funds are not supposed to be used for abortions. The program provides family planning services to low-income individuals, and the law states that Title X grants may not be used “where abortion is a method of family planning.”

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Prior to 2019, however, Planned Parenthood was one of the largest recipients of Title X funding, receiving about $60 million a year. Under the Trump administration, the abortion chain chose to leave the program rather than comply with the rules. Those rules required Title X recipients to make their abortion businesses physically and financially separate from the program and to stop referring women for abortions.

However, the Biden administration quickly reversed the rules in October, so that abortion facilities no longer have to separate their family planning services from their abortion businesses.

Yost said the former rules built up walls to ensure that taxpayer funding was not being used to support abortions, which is illegal. He cited the 1970 Family Planning Services and Population Research Act regarding Title X, which prohibits tax funds being “used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.”

Joining Ohio in the lawsuit are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia. Some states do not participate in the Title X program.

A recent Marist poll found that, by a double-digit margin, a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion (54 percent to 39 percent).

Yost and 19 other states also warned the Biden administration of their objections to the new rule before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services implemented it in October, according to Yost’s office.

Planned Parenthood is a billion-dollar abortion chain that aborts more unborn babies than any other group in the U.S. Its latest annual report, which is publicly available online, shows more than 354,000 abortions, about 40 percent of all abortions in the U.S.

The same report showed that many of Planned Parenthood’s actual health services continue to decline. It provided less contraception, sterilizations, cancer screenings, adoption referrals and other women’s health services than the previous year, mirroring a continued downward trend.

Its patient numbers also have been dropping steadily over the past decade amid numerous reports of alleged unethical and illegal activities by Planned Parenthood, including selling aborted baby body partsbotching abortions that killed womencovering up the sexual abuse of minorsdiscriminating against pregnant and racial minority employees, exploiting young girls by selling cross-sex hormones and more.