Our tax dollars should go to community-based centers that provide comprehensive care rather than abortion mills that masquerade as women’s health clinics.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is set to accomplish one of the primary goals of the pro-life movement since the landmark Dobbs decision three years ago: defunding Big Abortion.
If the bill passes the Senate with its current language, patients will not be able to receive Medicaid reimbursements for services at Planned Parenthood facilities. Two Planned Parenthood executives, Alexis McGill Johnson and Ruth Richardson, told Politico’s Women Rule column a few weeks ago that this would lead to the closure of up to one-third of brick-and-mortar Planned Parenthood clinics and deal a serious blow to health care access for low-income women.
Without Medicaid reimbursements, McGill Johnson and Richardson explain, the clinics cannot stay financially afloat and up to 200 of the 600 Planned Parenthood clinics across the country may have to close. Shutting down these clinics may leave millions of Americans without health care they’ve relied on for years, forcing many of them to travel for care or to forgo lifesaving preventative measures such as wellness exams and cancer screenings. . . .
The people who will be most affected by the defunding are already the most vulnerable in the community, McGill Johnson and Richardson add.
“The majority of our health centers are in rural or medically underserved communities. We see patients regardless of their ability to pay. We believe that they deserve access to high quality care. This is our literal reason for existing.”
The concern sounds compassionate, but it doesn’t reflect reality. While the abortion lobby wants to garner support by arguing that its concern is comprehensive health care for women, the focus is and always has been abortion.
A recent report from the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute found that for every Planned Parenthood clinic in the United States, there are 15 federally funded, community-based health clinics offering women’s health services. That’s more than 8,800 community women’s health providers for just 579 in-person and virtual Planned Parenthood providers.
Even if Planned Parenthood clinics began to close due to lack of Medicaid reimbursements, women would be able to take this money elsewhere, according to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser.
“Medicaid money is attached to the person, so she’ll retain the same amount of money,” Dannenfelser said when asked about Planned Parenthood’s claims. “She’ll just take it to a different place. She’ll take it to the 15 federally funded and qualified health centers versus the one less comprehensive and less accessible Planned Parenthood.”
Federally qualified health centers are community-based health care providers vetted and funded by the federal government to provide comprehensive health care to low-income, underserved populations. Rural health clinics, also counted in the Lozier report, qualify to receive funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to make health care available to Medicare and Medicaid recipients in underserved, rural areas vulnerable to health care shortages.
Each of these centers provides the same women’s health care as Planned Parenthood — including Pap smears, cancer screenings, and wellness exams — as well as more comprehensive health care services. They also provide HIV tests and contraception. The difference: Many community-based health centers don’t provide abortions.
In states such as Arkansas with total abortion bans, low-income women who qualify for Medicaid reimbursements regularly receive women’s health services and prenatal care at federally qualified health centers, according to Arkansas-based OB-GYN Sudheer Jayaprabhu.
“We’ve seen here that unless a patient doesn’t want to get care . . . it’s almost unheard of in our community not to get prenatal care,” Jayaprabhu told National Review. “From an on-ground perspective, there’s not a lot that I see missing that Planned Parenthood would provide us in our community.”
While abortions accounted for 96.9 percent of pregnancy care services that Planned Parenthood offered in 2022–23, prenatal care, miscarriage care, and adoption referrals together accounted for only 3 percent of these services. Meanwhile, the abortion giant has closed several facilities in recent months as patients and staff report malpractice and declining standards of medical care. Much of the organization’s national funding to affiliates has gone toward legal support and political battles rather than improving care at clinics, the New York Times reported earlier this year.
The distribution and quality of community-based health centers varies by state, but the fact remains indisputable: Federally qualified health centers are more accessible and better equipped to assist women in need than Planned Parenthood. If our tax dollars are going to support health care through federal grants and Medicaid funding, they should go toward community-based health centers that provide comprehensive care rather than abortion mills that masquerade as women’s health clinics.