For two months, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s bobblehead was a prominent feature next to the sacrificial altars of Planned Parenthood supporters. After Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill defunding Planned Parenthood, which President Trump signed, the Obama appointee decided it was unconstitutional. For reasons only her law school and law professors can unravel, there was a First Amendment right to spend medicaid dollars at abortion clinics.
So wrong was she that, according to reports, three Biden-appointed judges on the First Circuit overruled her and lifted her injunction.
Planned Parenthood (PP), much like NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, does not have a constitutional right to federal funding.
“The American people, through Congress, spoke clearly with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Taxpayers should not be forced to spend a dime funding a brutal industry that ends at least 1.1 million lives a year, harms women while providing dwindling, substandard health care services, and engages in partisan political activism – especially when more accessible, more comprehensive options outnumber Planned Parenthoods 15 to 1. We are confident the Trump administration will prevail against the abortion industry’s lawfare.”
The Fifth Circuit ruled against abortion centers’ rights to such funds in 2020, with the US Supreme Court confirming in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic in 2025. “That 6-3 ruling, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, stated that Medicaid law does not explicitly grant patients an enforceable right to choose their health care provider.”
Even DHHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a lifelong Dem and abortion rights supporter, came out against Talwani’s ruling, in part because it was such a stretch to begin with. She tried to make a First Amendment speech/association claim to justify PP’s right to taxpayer money, which cannot be found in actual law, while ignoring a ruling against NPR (which made a similar claim) whose ink was barely dry.
Do Planned Parenthood or US District Judge Indira Talwani read Court opinions or decisions? NPR already tried this, and they are actually pretending to be in the speech business.
“The government is not obligated to fund “speech” whereby”There is no requirement that the government fund anything enumerated in the Bill of Rights, such that not funding them is a violation of those rights. It’s settled law, or at least opinion.”
Slapped down by three Biden appointees. That’s gotta hurt. So too, the pain and suffering at Planned Parenthood, whose desperately needed service is unsustainable without the government robbing other people to fund it. No, they aren’t down and out, but a few hundred more clinics are likely to close in places where pregnancy Care centers would likely do well to attend to the needs of women in crisis pregnancy. Emphasis on care.
Planned Parenthood ended abortions; there was no care and no planning, just the procedure and maybe a record of the transaction. Fewer of their sort can only be good for women’s health, especially the very young women who will live long enough to be born.
