Supreme Court to decide if South Carolina can defund Planned Parenthood

By Michael Gryboski

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral arguments in a case that will determine if South Carolina can lawfully defund Planned Parenthood for providing elective abortions.

In a miscellaneous order released Wednesday morning, the high court agreed without comment to grant a petition for a writ of certiorari in the case of Kerr v. Planned Parenthood.

The arguments will focus on question 1 of the petition, which asks the Supreme Court to determine if “the Medicaid Act’s any-qualified provider provision unambiguously confers a private right upon a Medicaid beneficiary to choose a specific provider.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal nonprofit that filed a petition with the high court to have the case heard, celebrated the news of the miscellaneous order.

ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch said in a statement released Wednesday that he believes “states like South Carolina should be free to determine that Planned Parenthood and other entities that peddle abortion are not qualified to receive taxpayer funding through Medicaid.”

“Congress did not unambiguously create a right for Medicaid recipients to drag states into federal court to challenge those decisions, so no such right exists,” stated Bursch.

Bursch expected the Supreme Court “to hold that Congress did not intend to allow federal courts to second guess states’ decisions about which providers are qualified to receive Medicaid funding.”

In 2018, Gov. Henry McMaster ordered the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to end their Medicaid agreements with abortion providers in the state.

Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider, and a patient sued the state, with a federal district court blocking South Carolina’s enforcement of the order.

In March, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the lower court decision, with Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, authoring the opinion.

“This case is, and always has been, about whether Congress conferred an individually enforceable right for Medicaid beneficiaries to freely choose their healthcare provider,” wrote Wilkinson.

“Preserving access to Planned Parenthood and other providers means preserving an affordable choice and quality care for an untold number of mothers and infants in South Carolina.”

Wilkinson also claimed in his opinion that “if Planned Parenthood clinics in South Carolina were to be shuttered, other Medicaid-funded clinics in the state would be more hard-pressed to meet the demand in family planning care.”

“This is precisely the prospect Congress wished to avoid. It did not wish to leave the right it so explicitly granted solely to the cumbersome machinery of agency appeals that permit patients only to challenge the denial of individual claims,” he added.