Thursday, September 1, 2011

Federal judge forces Kansas to fund Planned Parenthood

by Kathleen Gilbert

TOPEKA, Kansas, August 31, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Yet another federal judge has forced a U.S. state to resume funding the country’s largest abortion provider, this time in Kansas.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten on Tuesday dismissed state officials’ request to clarify whether the state would have to issue funding to the abortion giant monthly or quarterly, weeks after the judge had granted Planned Parenthood’s request to block the state’s attempt to stop funding for Planned Parenthood altogether.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback had spearheaded and signed a 2011-12 budget earlier this year that allocated federal Title X family planning funds to clinics that provide comprehensive health care, which excludes Planned Parenthood.

Marten, however, has ruled that the state must pay Planned Parenthood quarterly as before, and not in monthly installments as officials had requested, saying that the smaller payments “would have the effect of undermining the plaintiff’s ability to maintain its current level of services.”

The Kansas City Star reports that state officials had argued that Planned Parenthood never proved that it required the taxpayer funds to maintain current operation levels, and that the funds only constituted 5.5 percent of the abortion chain’s revenue.

Officials had also criticized Planned Parenthood’s presumption of entitlement to the funding. “Title X was not intended to be an entitlement program for Planned Parenthood,” said Kansas Department of Health and Environment head Dr. Robert Moser.

Kathy Ostrowski, State Legislative Director of Kansans for Life, noted that the court battle amounts to a desperate bid for survival by Planned Parenthood, according to its claimed financial struggles.

“Planned Parenthood told the court that even with last year’s Title X funding, its Hays and Wichita outlets were already operating at a $220,000 annual loss!” wrote Ostrowski Tuesday at National Right to Life News. “Thus, Planned Parenthood is demanding that the state put in one-third million dollars to help float two losing businesses!”

Operation Rescue President Troy Newman decried Tuesday’s ruling, saying that Judge Marten, “is forcing Kansas tax-payers to fund a private organization with which it has no valid contract. That is completely improper. One cannot enforce contracts that do not exist.

“Services that Planned Parenthood would seek to supply are available through legitimate health care providers. There is no harm to the public. This is the very definition of judicial tyranny,” he said.

A judge in North Carolina on Friday also blocked that state’s budget depriving Planned Parenthood of funding, a measure vetoed by Gov. Bev Purdue before the General Assembly overrode the veto.

In June, Indiana’s Planned Parenthood budget cut was also temporarily axed by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt said that, because the Obama administration threatened to withhold all $5.3 billion in the state’s Medicaid allotment over the abortion giant’s $3 million share, the cut was too risky for the people of Indiana.

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