Pennsylvania court strikes down ban on use of Medicaid funds for abortions | Pennsylvania
A Pennsylvania court on Monday said the state constitution guarantees the right to an abortion, striking down a decades-old law that prohibited the use of state Medicaid funds to cover abortion costs.
The decision by the appellate federal court’s divided seven-judge panel is a major victory for Planned Parenthood and abortion clinic operators, who first sued Pennsylvania in 2019 over Medicaid funding restrictions.
Although the case initially focused on the state’s Medicaid restrictions, litigation escalated significantly after the U.S. supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, ending nearly half a century of federal abortion protections.
The court’s decision on Monday marks the first time that the right to an abortion is protected by Pennsylvania’s constitution, joining a handful of states where reproductive rights advocates have had success protecting access to abortion by pointing to state constitutions.
It is stated that the case may still be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
“Today, our state court examined the Pennsylvania constitution and determined that there is a right to reproductive autonomy, and that that is the highest level of right possible,” said Susan Frietsche, executive director of the Women’s Law Project, which helped represent the clinics.
A spokesman for Republican David Sunday and the attorney general said the office was reviewing the ruling and did not say whether it would appeal.
Democrats publicly praised the decision, as did abortion rights advocates.
“I have long opposed this unconstitutional ban and did not defend it as governor because a woman’s ability to access reproductive care should never be determined by her income,” Gov. Josh Shapiro said in a statement.
State Treasurer Stacy Garrity, the likely Republican candidate who could challenge Shapiro in the fall general election, said in a statement that the court’s “decision to force our tax dollars to pay for abortions is not only misguided but immoral.”
In 2019, plaintiffs asked the court to order the state’s Medicaid program to begin covering abortion without restriction, arguing that a 1982 Pennsylvania law restricting the state’s Medicaid funding violated low-income women’s constitutional equal protection rights.
The case has taken several turns since then, with a lower court ruling in 2021 finding the plaintiffs lacked legal standing and also saying they were bound by a 1985 decision by the state supreme court that upheld the 1982 law.
But in 2024, the state supreme court reversed the lower court’s decision and also found that previous court decisions had failed to fully consider the scope of state constitutional protections against discrimination beyond those provided by the federal constitution.
The seven judges on the lower court hearing the case largely sided with the plaintiffs on Monday. The majority opinion said that if women should carry a pregnancy to term, the state should invest in maternal and infant health services and other resources.
The attorney general’s office had argued that the state had an interest in “protecting fetal life” and that excluding Medicaid coverage helped support that goal.
“If the state believes that certain medical procedures may psychologically harm women, the state can license, regulate, and train such care. This is less intrusive than categorically taking the entire medical procedure off the table for some women, some of whom may benefit from that procedure—a fact that the attorney general did not dispute,” the majority opinion said.
Abortion opponents were quick to criticize Monday’s decision.
“By declaring a sweeping constitutional ‘right to reproductive autonomy’ and mandating taxpayer-funded abortion through Medicaid, the Court overstepped its authority, ignored the plain text of our state constitution, and forced millions of Pennsylvanians who believe life begins at conception to subsidize the murder of unborn children,” said Michael Geer, president of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which opposes abortion rights.
According to state law in Pennsylvania, abortion is legal up to the 23rd week of pregnancy.
