Biden administration reverses Trump rule barring federally funded family planning clinics
Source: Washington Post
The Biden administration on Monday revoked a Trump-era rule that became a flash point in the abortion wars by forbidding clinics that receive federal family planning aid from advising people about ending their pregnancies. The new rule for the half-century-old family planning program known as Title X will allow health centers to receive the federal funds even if they refer patients for abortions. It takes effect Nov. 8. The rule reverses a move initiated in 2018 by former president Donald Trump to appeal to the social conservatives crucial to his political base, siding with them in a long-running battle with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other family planning groups.
Federal health officials issued the latest rewrite as the nation’s abortion laws have been thrust into the forefront of legal and political debate. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that cemented abortion rights in the United States, is under fresh attack as the high court’s composition has grown increasingly conservative. A month ago, a divided Supreme Court said that a new Texas law, which seeks to ban nearly all abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, could go into effect while the statute’s legality is fought out in the courts. And the high court is reviewing a Mississippi law, blocked by lower courts, that would prohibit almost all abortions after 15 weeks of gestation.Critics of the Trump administration’s rewrite of Title X policy — mainly reproductive rights advocates and other civil libertarians — derided it as an “abortion gag rule” that constrained what doctors and other health practitioners could discuss with patients.
Rather than heeding the restrictions, affiliates of Planned Parenthood, which serve about four in 10 of the program’s patients, as well as other health centers, forfeited the Title X funds that had been a main support of their work. An estimated 981 clinics — about one in four that received Title X money — dropped out in 2019, and a half-dozen states no longer had any health centers in the program, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and policy organization. More than 20 states, which also receive some of the $286 million in family planning grants, filed federal lawsuits to try to prevent the restrictions from taking effect.
Lower courts in Maryland and on the West Coast issued injunctions that blocked them temporarily. But in the summer of 2019, a California appeals court decided the Trump rule could begin while the litigation played out. And after giving protesting Title X participants two extra months to report their plans to comply with the rule, Trump health officials put it into effect. In February, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in a divided decision in favor of the restrictions. Title X has been an ideological lightning rod since shortly after it was created in 1970 under former president Richard Nixon as part of federal public health law. It is intended mainly to help poor or uninsured women.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/biden-administration-title-x-abortion/2021/10/04/33451c1a-223c-11ec-9309-b743b79abc59_story.html
Full headline: Biden administration reverses Trump rule barring federally funded family planning clinics from abortion referrals
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