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Washington — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected Planned Parenthood’s challenge to South Carolina’s attempt to bar the organization from participating in its Medicaid program, clearing the way for the state to strip the organization of Medicaid funds.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the case of Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic to find that Planned Parenthood and a patient cannot sue the state of South Carolina under federal civil rights law to enforce a provision of the Medicaid Act that aims to ensure a beneficiary can obtain medical care from the provider of their choosing. Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered the opinion for the court. The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, were in dissent.
The court’s conservative majority reversed a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that allowed Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit against state officials to move forward and prevented South Carolina from excluding the organization from its Medicaid program.
The ruling is likely to pave the way for more states to exclude Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs, a move that anti-abortion rights have been pushing for several years.
“[T]he decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy. New rights for some mean new duties for others. And private enforcement actions, meritorious or not, can force governments to direct money away from public services and spend it instead on litigation,” Gorsuch wrote. “The job of resolving how best to weigh those competing costs and benefits belongs to the people’s elected representatives, not unelected judges charged with applying the law as they find it.”
