States Need Not Fund Planned Parenthood

 South Carolina shouldn’t have to bankroll Planned Parenthood. Instead, it and all states should be able to send their Medicaid dollars where they think best—even if that means excluding providers that profit from abortion and peddle life-altering transition drugs to minors.

That’s the argument my firm, Alliance Defending Freedom, presented before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. We represent the health care director for South Carolina against the nation’s largest abortion giant, which has long enriched itself on the taxpayer dime.

Planned Parenthood is not a real health care provider. It’s a multi-billion-dollar business that puts abortion and gender ideology over women’s health. Between 2018 and 2023, Planned Parenthood received $3.2 billion in direct public funding. That’s on top of the hundreds of millions more it receives from private donors. And since the year Roe v. Wade was reversed, it’s had a fundraising boom, amassing over $2.5 billion in net assets.

Even The New York Times recently reported that, over the last five years, “the national office has distributed more than $899 million to affiliates to help them deliver care, but none of it went directly to medical services.” Indeed, from 2022-2023, women’s preventative-care visits at Planned Parenthood fell by 31%. Since 2010, cancer screening and prevention services have declined by 71%, including a 72% drop for breast exams and 74% for pap tests.

Much of the money went instead to pro-abortion politicking, legal costs, and marketing. Meanwhile, it appears that quality of care has suffered. More women are now speaking out about incompetent staff, toxic work cultures, filthy facilities, and general harm suffered by patients at the place whose motto is “care, no matter what.”

Mayra Rodriguez worked at Planned Parenthood for 17 years and served as director of three Arizona clinics. When she proposed expanding or converting those clinics to offer more non-abortion services, her superiors repeatedly reminded her that’s not where the money is. She later raised concerns about mismanagement and unethical practices, including the misuse of federal Medicaid and Title X dollars that went toward abortions. Shortly thereafter, she was fired.

Kathy Lesnoff worked as a nurse at an abortion facility in Illinois. She recalls helping perform 40-60 abortions a day, six days a week, with only a few minutes to get a woman on the table and then quickly move her to the next room. If she did anything to slow down the “conveyor belt” (as one former Planned Parenthood nurse described it), she’d get written up, and it would go in her employment file.

As The Times reported, “employees sometimes administered expired pain medication or the wrong medications as they scrambled to move people in and out … it was not uncommon for patients to be taken to the wrong room and prepped for the wrong procedure.”

A Pennsylvania woman got her first abortion at Planned Parenthood at age 19. She described her experience of being drugged and not giving full consent. Later, an abuser forced her to get another abortion. Planned Parenthood didn’t bother asking her about the bruises all over her body or if she even wanted an abortion. It performed it on her anyway.

While abortion is Planned Parenthood’s staple, many don’t realize how active it is in gender transitions, too. Planned Parenthood is now the second-largest provider of transition drugs in the U.S. Despite the growing scientific consensus around the world that giving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors is a bad idea, Planned Parenthood doles them out. They profit off the notion that vulnerable kids struggling to find comfort in their bodies should inject themselves with drugs that could leave them permanently sterilized—consigned to live as lifelong patients.

South Carolina was right to deem Planned Parenthood unqualified to receive tax dollars under its Medicaid program. But naturally, the abortion giant wants to keep the Medicaid dollars rolling. It sued in federal court, forcing the state to restore its funding through Medicaid. After several years of appeals, the Supreme Court finally agreed to take the case.

Our nation is filled with high-quality, publicly funded clinics that offer a range of excellent services. South Carolina has nearly 200. There is simply no reason the state should be forced to hand over millions of taxpayer dollars to an already cash-flush corporation that preys on women, harms children, and devotes itself to political activism. ADF is urging the high court to uphold South Carolina’s freedom to direct its resources where it deems best.

Kristen Waggoner is CEO, president, and general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom. 

https://www.realclearhealth.com/blog/2025/04/02/states_need_not_fund_planned_parenthood_1101537.html