A federal judge blocked Texas’ efforts to steer Medicaid funding away from Planned Parenthood, becoming the latest state’s effort to fall short.
The ruling by U.S. District Sam Sparks of Austin comes a month after he temporarily halted the state’s move, which would have stripped the women’s healthcare and abortion provider of millions of dollars of government funding.
Texas is one of several states that has tried to defund Planned Parenthood in the wake of undercover videos from abortion foe David Daleiden showing how some of its clinics provided aborted fetal tissue for medical research. But courts have blocked Arkansas, Alabama, Kansas and Mississippi — and now Texas — from excluding the group from Medicaid reimbursements, saying they can’t single out specific health providers that are qualified to serve low-income Americans.
Planned Parenthood had argued that it would have been forced to reduce health services for about 11,000 low-income women in Texas if it had lost access to Medicaid funds.
