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    Texas threatens to sue organizations and doctor for increasing abortion pill access

    The heated US war over abortion pills warmed up another degree on Wednesday, as the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sent cease-and-desist letters to two organizations and an individual that he accused of mailing abortion pills to Texans or facilitating their shipment. Paxton threatened to sue if they do not stop their alleged activities.“These abortion drug organizations and radical activists are not above the law, and I have ordered the immediate end of this unlawful conduct,” Paxton said in a news release announcing the letters.The state of Texas bans virtually all abortions.Paxton sent the letters to Plan C, a website that provides information about how to obtain abortion pills; Her Safe Harbor, an organization that provides abortions through telemedicine; and Rémy Coeytaux, a doctor who has been accused of mailing abortion pills to a Texan.Debra Lynch, a nurse practitioner who works with Her Safe Harbor, said that Paxton’s letter would not stop the organization from sending abortion pills to people. If anything, Lynch suggested, it would spur the group on.“None of our providers are primarily concerned with our own wellbeing or our own legal status,” Lynch said. “All the horrors that women are facing because of these ridiculous bans and restrictions outweigh anything that could possibly happen to us as providers, in terms of a fine or a lawsuit or even jail time, if it were to come to that.”Lynch said that in the hours after news of Paxton’s letter broke, Her Safe Harbor received more than 150 requests from Texans who were afraid about abortion access and want to obtain pills that they may use in the future. Normally, Her Safe Harbor has around four to five providers taking calls from patients. Now, they plan to have at least 10 working “until this wave of fear subsides”.Neither Plan C nor Coeytaux immediately replied to the Guardian’s request for comment.In the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and unleashed a wave of state-level abortion bans, abortions have surged in the United States. This rise is due in large part to the availability of abortion pills and the emergence of “shield laws”, which have been enacted by a handful of blue states and aim to protect abortion providers who mail pills across state lines from out-of-state prosecution.By the end of 2024, clinicians working through shield laws were facilitating an average of 12,330 abortions per month, according to data from #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning.Enraged by this development, anti-abortion advocates have in recent months stepped up their campaign to crush abortion pill providers. In his cease-and-desist letters, Paxton – a Republican who is running to become a US senator – repeatedly cited the Comstock Act of 1873, an anti-vice law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. Although legal experts have long regarded the Comstock Act as a dead letter, several anti-abortion activists now believe that the fall of Roe has left the federal government free to fully enforce the act.Alongside 15 other state attorneys general, Paxton earlier this summer signed onto a letter imploring Congress to pass a law that would pre-empt states’ shield laws. He has also sued a New York-based doctor whom he accused of mailing abortion pills into Texas. Then, after a New York county court official said that the state’s shield law prohibited New York from enforcing a fine against the doctor, Paxton sued the official.Paxton’s cease-and-desist letters also follow similar letters sent by the Arkansas attorney general, Republican Tim Griffin. In July, Griffin sent a cease-and-desist letter to Possibility Labs, the parent company of Plan C, and to Mayday Medicines, the parent company of Mayday Health. Like Plan C, Mayday Health offers information about abortion pills, but does not directly sell them.Other anti-abortion activists are going after abortion providers through other legal avenues. A Texas man who said that Coeytaux supplied abortion pills to aid his female partner’s abortion has also sued Coeytaux in a federal wrongful death lawsuit. The man is being represented in court by Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion attorney who masterminded a six-week abortion ban that took effect in Texas in 2021.Last week, Mitchell filed another federal wrongful death lawsuit against a different abortion provider. More

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    Judge orders Trump administration to continue Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood

    The Trump administration must continue reimbursing Planned Parenthood clinics for Medicaid-funded services, a federal judge ruled on Monday, in an escalating legal war between the reproductive health giant and the White House over Republican efforts to “defund” Planned Parenthood.Days after Donald Trump signed his sweeping tax bill, Planned Parenthood sued over a provision in the bill that ended Medicaid payments for one year to abortion providers that received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023, such as Planned Parenthood. The new court order, from US district judge Indira Talwani in Boston, will protect Medicaid funding for all Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide while litigation in the case continues.The order also replaces and expands a previous edict handed down by Talwani, which initially granted a preliminary injunction specifically blocking the government from cutting Medicaid payments only to Planned Parenthood affiliates that did not provide abortions or did not receive at least $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements in a given year.“Patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable,” Talwani wrote in her Monday order.“In particular, restricting members’ ability to provide healthcare services threatens an increase in unintended pregnancies and attendant complications because of reduced access to effective contraceptives, and an increase in undiagnosed and untreated STIs.”More than 80 million people rely on Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people.It is already illegal to use Medicaid to pay for most abortions, but Planned Parenthood clinics – which treat a disproportionate number of people who use Medicaid – rely on the program to reimburse it for services such as birth control, STI tests and cancer screenings.In its lawsuit, Planned Parenthood had argued that it would be at risk of closing nearly 200 clinics in 24 states if it is cut off from Medicaid funds. These closures would probably be felt most strongly in blue states, since they are home to larger numbers of people who use Medicaid. A Planned Parenthood affiliate in California has already been forced to close five clinics as a result of the “defunding” provision.Planned Parenthood estimated that, in all, more than 1 million patients could lose care.“We will keep fighting this cruel law so that everyone can get birth control, STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings and other critical healthcare, no matter their insurance,” the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s president and CEO, Alexis McGill Johnson, said in a statement after the Monday ruling.Planned Parenthood is battling overwhelming political and economic headwinds. Even if it prevails against the Trump administration, its affiliates could still be removed from Medicaid in red states, thanks to a June decision by the US supreme court in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its Medicaid program.  On Monday, the state of Missouri also sued the Planned Parenthood Federation of America – the mothership organization that knits together Planned Parenthood’s network of regional affiliates – over accusations that the organization downplayed the medical risks of a common abortion pill, mifepristone, “to cut costs and boost revenue”. The lawsuit, which asks for more than $1m in damages, is part of an ongoing campaign by anti-abortion activists to cut off access to mifepristone.More than 100 studies, conducted across dozens of countries and over more than three decades, have concluded that mifepristone is a safe way to end a pregnancy.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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    Trump administration to destroy nearly $10m of contraceptives for women overseas

    The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.“It is unacceptable that the State Department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.“This is a waste of US taxpayer dollars and an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths,” added Shaheen, who in June sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, about the matter.The department decided to destroy the contraceptives because it could not sell them to any “eligible buyers”, in part because of US laws and rules that prohibit sending US aid to organizations that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for the right to it overseas, according to the state department spokesperson.Most of the contraceptives have less than 70% of their shelf life left before they expire, the spokesperson said, and rebranding and selling the contraceptives could cost several million dollars. However, the aide who visited the warehouse said that the earliest expiration date they saw on the contraceptives was 2027, and that two-thirds of the contraceptives did not have any USAID labels that would need to be rebranded.The eradication of the contraceptives is part of the Trump administration’s months-long demolition of the Agency for International Development (USAID), the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid in the world. After the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) erased 83% of USAID’s programs, Rubio announced in June that USAID’s entire international workforce would be abolished and its foreign assistance programs would be moved to the state department. The agency will be replaced by an organization called America First.In total, the funding cuts to USAID could lead to more than 14m additional deaths by 2030, according to a recent study published in the journal the Lancet. A third of those deaths could be children.“If you have an unintended pregnancy and you end up having to seek unsafe abortion, it’s quite likely that you will die,” said Sarah Shaw, the associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, a global family planning organization that works in nearly 40 countries. “If you’re not given the means to space or limit your births, you’re putting your life at risk or your child’s life at risk.”MSI tried to purchase the contraceptives from the US government, Shaw said. But the government would only accept full price – which Shaw said the agency could not afford, given that MSI would also have to shoulder the expense of transportingthe contraceptives and the fact that they are inching closer to their expiration date, which could affect MSI’s ability to distribute them.The state department spokesperson did not specifically respond to a request for comment on Shaw’s allegation, but MSI does provide abortions as part of its global work, which may have led the department to rule it out as an “eligible buyer”.In an internal survey, MSI programs in 10 countries reported that, within the next month, they expect to be out of stock or be on the brink of being out of stock of at least one contraceptive method. The countries include Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Senegal, Kenya and Sierra Leone.Shaw expects the stock to be incinerated. “The fact that the contraceptives are going to be burned when there’s so much need – it’s just egregious,” she said. “It’s disgusting.” The Department of State spokesperson did not respond to a request for information on the planned method of destruction.The destruction of the contraceptives is, to Shaw, emblematic of the overall destruction of a system that once provided worldwide help to women and families. USAID funding is threaded through so much of the global supply chain of family planning aid that, without its money, the chain has come apart. In Mali, Shaw said, USAID helped pay for the gas used by the vehicles that transport contraceptives from a warehouse. Without the gas money, the vehicles were stuck – and so were the contraceptives.“I’ve worked in this sector for over 20 years and I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” Shaw said. “The speed at which they’ve managed to dismantle excellent work and really great progress – I mean, it’s just vanished in weeks.”Other kinds of assistance are also reportedly being wasted. This week, the Atlantic reported that almost 500 metric tons of emergency food were expiring and would be incinerated, rather than being used to feed about 1.5 million children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, almost 800,000 Mpox vaccines that were supposed to be sent to Africa are now unusable because they are too close to their expiration date, according to Politico.The cuts to foreign aid are slated to deepen. Early on Friday morning, Congress passed a bill to claw back roughly $8bn that had been earmarked for foreign assistance.“It’s not just about an empty shelf,” Shaw said. “It’s about unfulfilled potential. It’s about a girl having to drop out of school. It’s about someone having to seek an unsafe abortion and risking their lives. That’s what it’s really about.” More

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    Republicans wanted fewer abortions and more births. They are getting the opposite | Judith Levine

    Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US supreme court case that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, is failing on its own terms. Since the ruling, in June 2022, the number of abortions in the US has risen. Support for reproductive rights is on the upswing. And the rate of voluntary sterilization among young women – a repudiation of Trumpian pronatalism, if a desperate one – jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there’s no reason to believe it will drop off.Also rising at an alarming clip are preventable maternal deaths and criminal prosecutions of pregnant people.Yet the 21 state legislatures that have imposed total or near-total bans are doing little or nothing to give doctors legal leeway to save the health and lives of pregnant women in medical distress, even if that means inducing abortion. In fact, rather than trying to save lives, they are prosecuting pregnant people who handle those emergencies on their own.The first three – more abortions, more pro-abortion sentiment, more contraception –have frustrated the anti-abortion crowd no end. They know they need stronger disincentives to abortion.Which brings us to the latter two: more punishment and more death. Was punishment the aim all along? And has the anti-abortion movement accepted pregnant people’s deaths as an unfortunate consequence of saving the pre-born?According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions rose 1.5% in 2024 from 2023, on top of a 11.1% leap in the first year after Dobbs, compared with 2020, before the near-bans enacted in several states that presaged the ruling.It’s also probably an undercount. The statistics include only “clinician-provided abortions”, either surgical or medical (using abortion pills), performed in healthcare facilities or via telemedicine. Guttmacher does not estimate how many abortions are happening outside the formal healthcare system, with drugs obtained directly from suppliers or through feminist underground networks.Indeed, Plan C, the country’s biggest clearinghouse for pill access, reports 2m visits to its website and 500,000 click-throughs to resources and care in 2024, a 25% increase from the year before. How many of those people ended their pregnancies at home, with only a friend or lover in attendance? Anecdotal evidence gleaned from activists suggests they number in the tens of thousands.At the same time, rather than making abortion “unthinkable”, as the anti-abortion activists pledge, the bans may be having the opposite effect. An analysis of two restrictive states, Arizona and Wisconsin, and one with broad access, New Jersey, found that negative attitudes toward abortion are down and positive ones up, in both red and blue states.And if the goal of banning abortion is to produce more children, that’s not working either. Public health researchers saw “an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures” – sterilization – following Dobbs among adults in their prime reproductive years, ages 18 to 30. Unsurprisingly, the increase in procedures for women (tubal ligations) was twice that for men (vasectomies).The Trump administration is cheerleading for procreation. “I want more babies in the United States of America,” declared JD Vance in his first public appearance as vice-president, at the March for Life in Washington. He blamed the declining birth rate on “a culture of abortion on demand” and the failure “to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life”. The federal budget extends some of that help. It raises the annual child tax credit (CTC) from $2,000 to $2,200. It also creates “Trump accounts”, $1,000 per child, which parents or employers can add to.But only those with social security numbers are eligible for either program; the tax credit is available only to people who earn enough to pay taxes; and as with any investment, those able to sow more in the savings accounts reap more. It’s clear what sort of baby the administration wishes to be born: white babies with “American” parents, and not the poorest.The carrots are not appetizing enough. The stick is not effective enough. So red-state legislators and prosecutors are ramping up the punitive approach.This year, Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states introduced bills defining abortion as homicide, and, for the first time, criminalizing both the provider and the patient.No such bill has passed – yet – and anti-abortion organizations are usually quick to renounce them publicly, nervous about widespread opposition. But their passage might not be far off. The bills are based on fetal personhood – the concept of conferring full legal rights to a fetus from conception forward. The idea was introduced in 1884 and finally written into one state’s law in 1986. By 2024, 39 states had fetal homicide laws. Last year, there were three bills criminalizing the person who has an abortion; now there are 10. And though the federal courts rejected fetal personhood for a century, it is the bedrock of anti-abortion politics, and this US supreme court is looking much more friendly toward it.While they work toward straightforward criminalization of ending one’s own pregnancy, anti-abortion lawmakers and prosecutors are making creative use of existing law to punish miscarriage, an event indistinguishable from elective abortion, just in case the pregnant person induced the miscarriage. The most ghoulish is the prohibition on abusing corpses.For instance: last week a 31-year-old South Carolina woman who miscarried and disposed of the tissue in the trash was arrested for “desecration of human remains”, a crime carrying a 10-year sentence. In March, a woman found bleeding outside her Georgia apartment after a miscarriage was jailed for “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body” for placing the remains in the bin. A week before that, a Pennsylvania teenager was under investigation for corpse abuse after a self-managed pill abortion and burial of the fetus in her yard.In a grim sense, these are the lucky ones: they survived. Because Dobbs has indisputably been deadly.“Mothers living in states that banned abortion were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth” as mothers living in states where abortion was legal and accessible, reports the Gender Equity Policy Institute. Maternal mortality rose 56% in Texas after it enacted a six-week ban; a Texan’s risk was one and a half times that of a Californian’s.The future isn’t sunny. A study of 14 total-ban states predicts that in the four years beginning a year after Dobbs, up to 42 mothers will die and as many as 2,700 will be afflicted with “severe maternal morbidity”, defined by the CDC as “unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short-term or long-term [health] consequences”. In one analysis Black women represented 63% of the deaths.The anti-abortion movement is indefatigable. “We abolishioners will not rest until we have effected the abolishment of human abortion,” one leader told Oklahoma Voice. But this is an unattainable grail. Where abortion is illegal, people still have abortions. They just take more risks. Globally, more than 39,000 women die yearly from unsafe abortions.As they run out of options, red-state lawmakers will harden criminal penalties against people who refuse to give up their reproductive self-determination. It may grow less outré to endorse Trump’s opinion, expressed in an unguarded moment, that women who get illegal abortions “deserve some form of punishment”. Whether intentional or not, the sentence for some of those women will be death.

    Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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    Pregnant doctor denied Covid-19 vaccine sues Trump administration

    A pregnant physician who was denied a Covid-19 vaccine is suing the Trump administration alongside a group of leading doctors associations, charging that the administration sought to “desensitize the public to anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric”, according to their attorney.The lawsuit specifically takes aim at health secretary Robert F Kennedy’s unilateral decision to recommend against Covid-19 vaccines for pregnant women and healthy children.Kennedy’s announcement circumvented expert scientific review panels and flouted studies showing pregnant women are at heightened risk from the virus, and made it more difficult for some to get the vaccine.“This administration is an existential threat to vaccination in America, and those in charge are only just getting started,” said Richard H Hughes IV, partner at Epstein Becker Green and lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a statement.The American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians and American Public Health Association are among a list of leading physicians associations named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.“If left unchecked, secretary Kennedy will accomplish his goal of ridding the United States of vaccines, which would unleash a wave of preventable harm on our nation’s children,” said Hughes. “The professional associations for pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, infectious disease physicians, high-risk pregnancy physicians, and public health professionals will not stand idly by as our system of prevention is dismantled. This ends now.”In late May, Kennedy announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children or pregnant women. The announcement, made on social media, contradicted a raft of evidence showing pregnant women and infants are at especially high-risk from the disease, including from the administration’s own scientific leaders.In June, Kennedy went further by firing all 17 sitting members of a key vaccine advisory panel to the CDC. The advisory panel is a key link in the vaccine distribution pipeline, helping to develop recommendations insurers use when determining which vaccines to cover.That panel met for the first time in late June. Members announced they would review both the childhood vaccine schedule and any vaccines that had not been formally reviewed in seven years. They also recommended against a long-vilified vaccine preservative, in spite of a lack of evidence of harm.The news comes amid the largest annual measles case count in 33 years, and amid reports of more parents seeking early vaccination for their children, fearing vaccines will go into shortage or no longer be covered by insurance. More

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    Planned Parenthood sues Trump administration over funding cuts in big bill

    Planned Parenthood sued the Trump administration on Monday over a provision in Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill that would strip funding from health centers operated by the reproductive healthcare and abortion provider.In a complaint filed in Boston federal court, Planned Parenthood said the provision was unconstitutional, and its clear purpose is to prevent its nearly 600 health centers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.Planned Parenthood said that would have “catastrophic consequences”, given that the health centers serve more than 1 million patients annually through Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people. More than 80 million people use Medicaid.“The true design of the Defund Provision is simply to express disapproval of, attack, and punish Planned Parenthood, which plays a particularly prominent role in the public debate over abortion,” Planned Parenthood said in its lawsuit.The lawsuit continued: “Stripping away this patient volume and reimbursements for care provided will result in the elimination of services, laying off staff and health center closures. The public health consequences for Medicaid patients and non-Medicaid patients alike will be dire and compounding.”The organization has estimated that the defunding could force roughly 200 Planned Parenthood clinics to shutter. Blue states, which are home to more people on Medicaid, would probably see a disproportionate number of closures.Since it is illegal to use Medicaid to pay for most abortions, Planned Parenthood clinics rely on the insurance program to reimburse them for providing services like birth control, STI tests and cancer screenings. But if blue-state clinics are forced to close, people will no longer be able to seek abortions at those clinics – a possibility that has led some abortion rights supporters, including Planned Parenthood, to call the Trump bill’s provision a “backdoor abortion ban”. Planned Parenthood provides an estimated 38% of US abortions.“We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, told the Guardian last week. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit asks the courts to declare the Trump bill’s provision unconstitutional on numerous grounds, or to at least preserve Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics that do not provide abortions. The reproductive health giant suggests in the lawsuit that Congress did not understand its structure when it passed the provision. The Planned Parenthood technically consists of a mothership group, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and nearly 50 regional affiliate groups that operate as independent entities.Medicaid is overseen by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. That agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Planned Parenthood is being buffeted by intense financial headwinds. This spring, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars earmarked for family planning providers who participate in Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program. Although several of those providers have since had their funding restored, a Planned Parenthood spokesperson said last week their affiliates had not received funding.The US supreme court also ruled in late June in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid reimbursement program. Red states may see that ruling as a blessing to their own efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.Even if Planned Parenthood’s Monday lawsuit succeeds, the organization will probably have to grapple with the consequences of that supreme court ruling for years to come. More

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    Planned Parenthood CEO warns Trump bill will lead to $700m loss and ‘backdoor abortion ban’

    Planned Parenthood stands to lose roughly $700m in federal funding if the US House passes Republicans’ massive spending-and-tax bill, the organization’s CEO said on Wednesday, amounting to what abortion rights supporters and opponents alike have called a “backdoor abortion ban”.“We are facing down the reality that nearly 200 health centers are at risk of closure. We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, said in an interview Wednesday morning. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”Anti-abortion activists have longed to “defund” Planned Parenthood for decades. They are closer than ever to achieving their goal.That $700m figure represents the loss that Planned Parenthood would face from a provision in the spending bill that would impose a one-year Medicaid ban on healthcare non-profits that offer abortions and that received more than $800,000 in federal funding in 2023, as well as the funding that Planned Parenthood could lose from Title X, the nation’s largest family-planning program. In late March, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars of Title X funding that had been set aside for some Planned Parenthood and other family-planning clinics.“Essentially what you are seeing is a gutting of a safety net,” said McGill Johnson, who characterized the bill as a “backdoor abortion ban” in a statement.Medicaid is the US government’s insurance program for low-income people, and about 80 million people use it. If the latest version of the spending-and-tax bill passes, nearly 12 million people are expected to lose their Medicaid coverage.Donald Trump has said that he would like the bill to be on his desk, ready for a signature, by 4 July.The provision attacking Planned Parenthood would primarily target clinics in blue states that have protected abortion rights since the overturning of Roe v Wade three years ago, because those blue states have larger numbers of people on Medicaid. Although not all Planned Parenthood clinics perform abortions, the reproductive healthcare giant provides 38% of US abortions, according to the latest data from Abortion Care Network, a membership group for independent abortion clinics.Among the clinics at risk of closure, Planned Parenthood estimated, more than 90% are in states that permit abortion. Sixty percent are located in areas that have been deemed “medically underserved”.In total, more than 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients could lose access to care.“There’s nowhere else for folks” to go, McGill Johnson said. “The community health centers have said they cannot absorb the patients that Planned Parenthood sees. So I think that we do need to just call it a targeted attack because that’s exactly how it is.”Nationally, 11% of female Medicaid beneficiaries between the ages of 15 and 49 and who receive family-planning services go to Planned Parenthood for a range of services, according to an analysis by the non-profit KFF, which tracks healthcare policy. Those numbers rise in blue states like Washington, Oregon and Connecticut.In California, that number soars to 29%. The impact on the state would be so devastating that Nichole Ramirez, senior vice-president of communication and donor relations at Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties, called the tax-and-spending package’s provision “a direct attack on us, really”.“They haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion nationwide and they haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion in California specifically,” said Ramirez, who estimated that Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties stands to lose between $40m and $60m. Ramirez continued: “This is their way to go about banning abortion. That is the entire goal here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on X, the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action reposted an image of a Planned Parenthood graphic calling the provision “backdoor abortion ban”. “They might be onto us,” Live Action wrote.The Planned Parenthood network is overseen by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, but it also consists of dozens of independent regional affiliates that operate nearly 600 clinics across the country. In June, as the spending-and-tax bill moved through Congress, Autonomy News, an outlet that focuses on threats to bodily autonomy, reported that Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s accreditation board had sent waivers out to affiliates to apply for approval to cease providing abortions in order to preserve access to Medicaid funding. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a memo sent to the leadership of one California affiliate suggests that leaders there had considered ending abortion services.McGill Johnson said that there have been discussions within Planned Parenthood’s network about what it would mean to stop offering abortions. But no affiliates, to her knowledge, are moving forward with plans to stop performing the procedure.“Educating our volunteers and teams around hard decisions to stand and understand the impact of that is different than weighing and considering a stoppage of abortion,” McGill Johnson said.The budget bill and Title X funding freeze aren’t the only sources of pressure on the group. The US supreme court last week ruled in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid reimbursement program – a ruling that will likely give a green light to other states that also want to defund Planned Parenthood.At least one other organization that provides abortion and family-planning services, Maine Family Planning, will be affected by the provision, according to the organization’s CEO, George Hill. Maine Family Planning directly operates 18 clinics, including several that provide primary care or are in rural, medically underserved areas. If the provision takes effect, Hill estimates, the organization would lose 20% of its operating budget.“It’s dressed up as a budget provision, but it’s not,” Hill said. “They’re basically taking the rug out from under our feet.” More

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    Trump rescinds Emtala guidance protecting women in need of emergency abortions

    The Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded Biden-era guidance clarifying that hospitals in states with abortion bans cannot turn away pregnant patients who are in the midst of medical emergencies – a move that comes amid multiple red-state court battles over the guidance.The guidance deals with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), which requires hospitals to stabilize patients facing medical emergencies. States such as Idaho and Texas have argued that the Biden administration’s guidance, which it issued in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, interpreted Emtala incorrectly.In its letter rescinding the guidance, the Trump administration said that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) “will continue to enforce Emtala, which protects all individuals who present to a hospital emergency department seeking examination or treatment, including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy. CMS will work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.”Abortion rights supporters said on Tuesday that rescinding the Biden administration’s guidance will muddy hospitals’ ability to interpret Emtala and endanger pregnant patients’ lives. Since Roe’s collapse, dozens of women have come forward to say that they were denied medical treatment due to abortion bans. A reported five pregnant women have died after having their care denied or delayed, or being unable to access legal abortions.“This action sends a clear message: the lives and health of pregnant people are not worth protecting,” Dr Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and the president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement. “Complying with this law can mean the difference between life and death for pregnant people, forcing providers like me to choose between caring for someone in their time of need and turning my back on them to comply with cruel and dangerous laws.”Last year, the US supreme court heard arguments in a case involving Idaho’s abortion ban, which at the time only allowed abortions in cases where a woman’s life was at risk. In contrast, most state abortion bans permit abortions when a patient’s “health” is in danger – a lower standard that could make it easier for doctors to intervene. Idaho’s standard, the Biden administration said, blocked doctors from providing abortions in some emergencies and thus violated Emtala’s requirement that hospitals must stabilize patients.Ultimately, the supreme court punted on the issue by ruling 6-3 on procedural grounds that the case had been “improvidently granted”, indicating they should have never taken it up in the first place.“This court had a chance to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation and we have squandered it,” wrote Ketanji Brown Jackson, the supreme court justice, at the time. “And for as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho, Texas and elsewhere will be paying the price.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration’s Tuesday move is not unexpected. In March, the administration moved to drop out of the case over the Idaho abortion ban. A local Idaho hospital later filed its own lawsuit over the ban. More