Eliminate Medicaid Funding for Planned Parenthood. Heritage Foundation, 2025 Mandate for Leadership -- pp. 471-2
Project 2025 recommends defunding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest and most prominent provider of family planning services.
“Policymakers should end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers …The bulk of federal funding for Planned Parenthood comes through the Medicaid program. HHS should take two actions to limit this funding:
1. Issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans.
2. Propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion from the Medicaid program.”
Talking Points
Planned Parenthood is the oldest and largest provider of family planning services in the nation. It provides a full range of family planning services, including sex education, contraception, and where necessary abortion services to over 2 million Americans. Planned Parenthood centers also provide testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and cervical cancers. Its services are particularly critical in underserved rural and inner-city communities, characterized as “medical deserts”, because they have so few medical providers.
Since the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in 1967 and 1972 upholding the privacy rights of Americans to purchase and use contraception and family planning services, family planning services are a required service in the federal/state Medicaid program. Every state Medicaid program must cover family planning for its beneficiaries, and the federal government provides a 90/10 federal match to each state to do so. Every Medicaid program must offer and assure freedom of choice of family planning providers and family planning services for all beneficiaries. Over 72 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid.
Pursuant to the Hyde Amendment adopted initially in 1977, federal Medicaid funding does not cover abortions for its beneficiaries except in cases of incest, rape or to save the life of the woman. Because it is a federal/state program, states like California can choose to cover Medicaid abortions but only with their own state funds, while states like Texas can decide not to do so.
In other words, Project 2025 seeks to defund and destroy Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading and largest family planning provider, based upon its false claims that Planned Parenthood is receiving federal Medicaid funds for elective abortions, when in fact the federal Medicaid funding it receives is for its family planning services. This is one part of Project 2025’s wholesale assault on the reproductive freedoms of American families, including defunding mifepristone, ending coverage of Plan B contraception, and resurrecting enforcement of the long dormant Comstock Act that criminalized the use of the federal postage system to mail obscene books, contraception and abortion materials.