The Supreme Court handed anti-abortion activists a victory on Thursday by rejecting Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit challenging South Carolina’s decision to remove it from the state Medicaid program.

The high court ruled 6-3 that Planned Parenthood and a patient were not able to sue the state to enforce the any-qualified-provider provision of Medicaid law. The lawsuit began when Gov. Henry McMaster (R-SC) signed an order in 2018 disqualifying abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from Medicaid reimbursements, even for non-abortion services.

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The majority opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, ruled that there is no right to sue over McMaster’s order.

“The job of resolving how best to weigh those competing costs and benefits belong to the people’s elected representatives, not unelected judges charged with applying the law as they find it,” Gorsuch said in the majority opinion.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, in which she claimed the “project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws continues,” referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1871.

“That venerable provision permits any citizen to obtain redress in federal court for ‘the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws’ of the United States. South Carolina asks us to hollow out that provision so that the State can evade liability for violating the rights of its Medicaid recipients to choose their own doctors,” Jackson said.

“The Court abides South Carolina’s request. I would not. For that reason, I respectfully dissent,” Jackson added.

While the question at the center of the case was not directly tied to abortion, the decision paves the way for other states to strip abortion providers’ ability to receive Medicaid funds.

Katie Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, hailed the decision and said Planned Parenthood was “rightly disqualified” from receiving Medicaid funds.

“By rejecting Planned Parenthood’s lawfare, the Court not only saves countless unborn babies from a violent death and their mothers from dangerously shoddy ‘care,’ it also protects Medicaid from exposure to thousands of lawsuits from unqualified providers that would jeopardize the entire program,” Daniel said Thursday.

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“Pro-life Republican leaders are eliminating government waste and prioritizing Medicaid for those who need it most – women, children, the poor, people with disabilities. Planned Parenthood was rightly disqualified,” she added.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.