The case going before the High Court involves South Carolina.
Talking about this in December on the Washington Watch program, attorney John Bursch of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the law firm representing South Carolina, said you have to back go almost seven years to when the state defunded Planned Parenthood as part of its Medicaid program.
"Every state takes Medicaid dollars from the federal government and then distributes those to hospitals and doctors and medical facilities all around the state to provide health care for low-income people, and Planned Parenthood demanded a portion of that," added Bursch.
Bursch said states can defund a medical provider from their state program "for a variety of reasons whether that be endangering patients or not following health and safety standards, for committing fraud and abuse and any number of other things." For several of those reasons, South Carolina defunded Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortion services in the U.S.
The "sexual and reproductive health care provider," as stated on its website, had the right to file an administrative appeal with the state, but it missed the deadline.
"So, it conspired with one of its patients, its clients, to file a federal lawsuit and got a federal judge to order the state to reinstate Planned Parenthood," Bursch said. "That went up to a court of appeals, which affirmed that, and now the Supreme Court has decided to review the decision, and it will decide whether states have the ability to defund Planned Parenthood as part of their Medicaid program."
Impact across the U.S.
The decision will be huge.
Planned Parenthood takes taxpayer dollars in states all across the country, and right now the federal courts of appeal are divided over whether states can defund it. If the Supreme Court rules in South Carolina's favor, not only would that give South Carolina the ability to defund Planned Parenthood and use those tax dollars in other places offering health care services, it would all many other states -- which are currently prohibited by similar court rulings in their locales -- to do the same.
"Arguments would likely be in April and because the Supreme Court is usually pretty good about issuing decisions in all of the cases it hears during a term, we would expect a decision by the end of June," Bursch said.
