The full U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 11-6 today that an Ohio law stripping women’s health providers who perform abortions of state funding is constitutional, overturning a lower circuit court’s injunction barring the law.
The money administered by the Ohio Department of Health going to Ohio Planned Parenthood clinics doesn’t fund abortions, but has been used to provide breast and cervical cancer screenings, testing and prevention measures for sexually transmitted diseases and efforts to address infant mortality and violence against women.
Planned Parenthood, which runs 19 health clinics in the state, has estimated it will lose $1.3 million a year in funding provided by six federal programs and administered by ODH due to the law. One of those programs, the STD Prevention Program, enabled Planned Parenthood to administer 70,000 HIV tests to low-income women in Ohio every year.
Only three of Planned Parenthood’s clinics — one in suburban Cleveland, one in Cincinnati and another in Columbus — perform abortions. Conservative state lawmakers and then-Attorney General Mike DeWine, however, argued that the public money still supported an organization that provided abortions and should therefore be taken from Planned Parenthood.
The ruling agrees, arguing that while women have the right to seek and obtain abortions under the constitution, abortion providers do not have a constitutional right to perform them that is substantially injured by the Ohio law withholding state funding.
“The Ohio law does not violate a woman’s right to obtain an abortion,” the decision by Judge Jeffrey Sutton reads. “It does not condition a woman’s access to any of these public health programs on refusing to obtain an abortion. It makes these programs available to every woman, whether she seeks an abortion or not. Nor, on this record, has there been any showing that the Ohio law will limit the number of clinics that offer abortions in the State.”
Planned Parenthood, in its lawsuit challenging the law, argues that losing the state funding could reduce the number of clinics in the state, making it harder for women to obtain constitutionally-protected abortions. The majority of the appeals court judges were unimpressed, however.
“Maybe; maybe not,” the decision reads. “More to the point, the conclusion is premature and unsupported by the record.”
In a dissent, Circuit Judge Helene N. White took issue with the majority’s reasoning.
“An abortion provider’s constitutional right may be derivative of the patient’s right — but it is a right nonetheless,” she wrote, challenging the majority’s assertion that clinics don’t have a constitutional right to perform abortions. “And, even if the abortion right belongs only to women, it has long been understood that “the right is inextricably bound up with” a provider’s ability to offer these services.”
Four of the judges ruling in favor of Ohio are appointees of President Donald Trump. The attorney who argued the case for the state, Eric Murphy, has since been appointed to the court as well. The U.S. Senate confirmed his appointment this month.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich originally signed the law in 2016, and Planned Parenthood’s legal challenge came shortly after. The appeals court originally upheld the district court’s injunction last April before ruling in favor of the state today.
This article appears in Mar 6-13, 2019.