Planned Parenthood Funding Restored After Congress Fails to Renew Medicaid Ban
Earlier this month, on July 4, the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the document that proclaims respect for the God-given right to life as a foundational principle upon which this great nation is founded.
But as Americans gathered for fireworks and parades, something else happened that day, with far less fanfare: Planned Parenthood regained the ability to bill Medicaid, restoring the flow of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Exactly one year earlier, on July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Among its provisions was a measure stripping Medicaid funding from healthcare providers that perform abortions. Pro-life advocates had sought a ten-year prohibition, but arcane Senate budget rules whittled it down to a single year. Planned Parenthood sued to stop even that, but the courts let it stand.
That year is now up. Congress, despite ample warning, failed to renew the provision before its summer recess. And so, as of two weekends ago, Planned Parenthood may once again bill Medicaid – a revenue stream worth, by some estimates, more than $600 million to the abortion giant over the coming year.
Pro-life leaders had been sounding the alarm for months. Unfortunately, their warnings went unheeded.
What the One-Year Ban on Planned Parenthood Funding Accomplished
The defunding year was brief, but it showed just why stopping the flow of taxpayer funds to abortionists is so important.
Planned Parenthood complained bitterly that the cuts forced it to close nearly thirty of its facilities, while numerous other centers struggled financially.
Some affiliates found creative ways to fill the gap. NPR reported in April – under the headline “Can Botox keep Planned Parenthood afloat?” – that the organization’s largest affiliate has begun offering Botox injections and IV hydration “for skin rejuvenation” to make up for the missing Medicaid millions.
That same month, Planned Parenthood released its latest annual report, covering the fiscal year that ended last June, just before the defunding went into effect. That year, the organization performed a record 434,450 abortions – up eight percent over the previous year, roughly one abortion every 73 seconds – while collecting a record $832 million in taxpayer funding.
Over the past decade, Planned Parenthood has committed nearly four million abortions and taken in more than seven billion taxpayer dollars. And all the while, as per usual, its cancer screenings and prenatal services have continued to decline.
And this is the organization that Congress has just allowed back into the taxpayer’s pocket.
Why Pro-Life Leaders Are Criticizing Congress
Pro-life leaders have responded to the lapse with anger, and rightly so.
Students for Life Action announced that it is giving every member of Congress an “F” for failing to keep Planned Parenthood defunded. Its president, Kristan Hawkins, sent a nationwide video message urging voters to demand that Congress act immediately to redirect healthcare spending away from those who end lives and toward those who save them.
“Because Congress did not act to keep the cuts in place, Planned Parenthood & Big Abortion received a gift from federal taxpayers on America’s 250th birthday – access to hundreds of millions in scarce Medicaid dollars,” she said. “The bottom line, pro-life voters want to see healthcare money invested with those who intend for their patients to survive with their lives and fertility intact.”
“The fact that congressional leaders decided not to defund them as part of the last reconciliation bill is just beyond me,” lamented Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). “That was really taking the pro-life movement and pro-life voters for granted, because you’re depending on those voters to turn out and vote for you in November.”
Much of the movement’s anger is aimed squarely at Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House, yet who spent the year on other priorities while the deadline ran out.
Live Action President Lila Rose noted that it was a “moral failure” that Congress failed to stop Planned Parenthood funding from resuming. “President Trump and Congress must act as fast as possible to restore and extend the defunding of Planned Parenthood and every organization that commits abortion,” Rose said in a statement.
The Hill reports that the episode has deepened the rift between the pro-life movement and the GOP. Good!
Politicians who campaign on the sanctity of life and then allow more than half a billion dollars a year to resume flowing to the nation’s largest abortion chain through sheer inattention deserve to hear about it and be held accountable. That’s not a partisan issue. It’s an issue of fundamental human rights.
Congress Must Defund Planned Parenthood Permanently
The good news is that the fight is far from over. Ahead of the deadline, a coalition of nearly forty pro-life leaders – including Live Action’s Lila Rose, SBA Pro-Life America’s Marjorie Dannenfelser, and National Right to Life’s Carol Tobias – sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune calling for a ten-year defunding of what they call “Big Abortion.”
“We respectfully urge the Senate to act without delay,” they wrote, “and make the defunding of Big Abortion a component of a 2026 budget reconciliation package.”
The U.S. bishops threw their weight behind the effort as well. Bishop Daniel E. Thomas of Toledo, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, wrote to lawmakers in May to support the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, which would permanently bar abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from the federal family planning program. He wrote:
We have consistently called for the separation of abortion from the Title X family planning program, but organizations like Planned Parenthood, despite performing hundreds of thousands of abortions every year, continue to receive millions of dollars in taxpayer money annually. … Abortion has no place in a taxpayer-funded program.
President Trump, asked in May whether Congress should continue blocking the funds, would say only that it has been “a very thorny issue” and that “it’s all under negotiation right now.”
Mr. President, there is nothing thorny about it: the taxpayer should not be forced to bankroll the killing of the preborn. The votes are there, if the will is. Republicans used the reconciliation process to defund Planned Parenthood once. They can do it again – this time for a full decade, or even permanently.
Planned Parenthood’s Global Empire Still Defunded
The battle over Planned Parenthood’s domestic funding has an international parallel. The Trump administration’s foreign aid reforms have also cut off the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the global federation to which Planned Parenthood Federation of America belongs.
By IPPF’s own accounting, the cuts have cost the federation some $87 million and forced the closure of hundreds of “service delivery points” around the world. Which only goes to show you: from the local state facility to the global federation, the abortion industry’s entire structure depends on the taxpayer’s money to sustain itself.
IPPF presents these numbers as a humanitarian catastrophe, claiming that millions of women are being denied “sexual and reproductive healthcare” – the standard euphemism for abortion and contraception.
But the charge gets things backwards. Defending human life means rejecting a model that presents the death of a child as a solution to poverty, illness, or lack of resources. It means directing public funds to genuine healthcare, to support for mothers, and to the protection of the preborn, rather than to an ideological industry that grows richer as it kills.
Pope Leo XIV on the Right to Life and America’s Founding Principles
On the very eve of the anniversary – and of the abortion industry’s return to the public trough – came a reminder of what America’s founding promise means. On Friday, July 3, Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, accepted the Liberty Medal of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and delivered a remarkable address on the founding principles of the United States. In it, he said:
The first right enshrined by the nation’s founders was the right to life, for no one who is deprived of life can enjoy liberty or pursue happiness. A country’s vitality is deeply tied to the value it affords to human life in every form and condition, acknowledging the dignity endowed upon every human person by virtue of their very existence.
The founders’ claim, the Holy Father noted, “is ultimately grounded in an understanding of the human person inspired by the great biblical vision of man and woman being created in the divine image. It is indeed here that we discover the basis of human dignity; dignity which precedes the establishment of any State, and whose custody constitutes its very purpose.”
The Holy Father called for the cultivation of a reverence for life “that sways the hearts of individuals and inspires laws that recognize and safeguard the gift from the moment of conception to natural death.” And he reminded his countrymen that “the moral greatness of a nation is manifested, above all, in its capacity to support, protect and cherish the lives of all, especially the most vulnerable and those whose worth is questioned.”
Congress should carefully read that speech. Then it should ask itself whether an industry that ends a human life every 73 seconds deserves a single cent of the American taxpayer’s money.
Related: What is Planned Parenthood Hiding from You? | Human Life International
Build a Culture that Protects Life
In the end, however, defunding is only a beginning. Planned Parenthood is not the disease; it is a symptom. The disease is the sexual revolution and its poisoned fruits: the breakdown of the family, sexual promiscuity, the contraceptive mentality that treats children as intruders rather than gifts, an epidemic of fatherlessness, and millions of women left to face unplanned pregnancies alone.
It can hardly surprise us that the abortion industry flourishes in a culture in which roughly four in ten children are born outside of marriage, and in which the family – the sanctuary of life – is everywhere under attack.
The remedy goes deeper than politics: a return to God’s design for human love. Marriage, fidelity, openness to life, and communities that surround mothers in difficult circumstances with real help rather than a referral to the local abortion facility. This is the work to which Human Life International is dedicated, in America and around the world.
So, I ask my American readers: contact your members of Congress and urge them to heed the pro-life coalition and the bishops by defunding the abortion industry. And I ask all of us to pray that, in this 250th anniversary year, America may recommit itself to the ideals of its founding – beginning with the first right of all, the right to life.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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