A federal appeals panel this month vacated a lower court’s injunction that prevented Texas from dropping Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid reimbursement rolls.
In a split ruling, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the lower court improperly blocked Texas’ attempt to strip $3.4 million in Medicaid funds from Planned Parenthood, which has challenged the action.
The appellate panel also ruled as “authentic” undercover videos of Planned Parenthood employees inside their clinics discussing selling fetal tissue for profit. The videos were shot and released in 2015 by the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life activist group.
The Jan. 17 ruling sent the case back to the lower court. It directed U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks in Austin to apply a lower standard to evaluate whether state officials were “arbitrary and capricious” when terminating Medicaid contracts with Planned Parenthood for noncompliance with medical and ethical standards.
It’s a big win for the Center for Medical Progress, whose secretly recorded videos inside Planned Parenthood clinics showed employees admitting to performing partial-birth abortions and altering abortions to preserve organs to resell for profit. Both actions are illegal.
“Most CNN segments are more heavily edited than the subtitles that we added to some of these videos for clarity,” Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden said in a phone interview. “What’s [also] significant is [the 5th Circuit judges] definitively debunk that smear from Planned Parenthood to say that Texas relied on those videos for primary evidence.”
From 2013 to 2015, Mr. Daleiden’s team posed as a biomedical research company looking to buy fetal tissue and vital organs from abortion clinics. In 2015, the center released the videos on YouTube.
Writing for the 5th Circuit panel, Judge Edith H. Jones said in a footnote in the ruling that the Texas Health and Human Services’ inspector general’s office hired a forensic team that confirmed the authenticity of the “sting” videos and concluded that the videos were not deceptively edited as had been widely reported.
“It’s a huge vindication for CMP’s undercover work and for citizen journalism as a method and critical part of driving the public discourse,” Mr. Daleiden said.
The legal question at play was not whether the videos were accurate, but whether Judge Sparks erred when he extensively reviewed the state agency’s decision to terminate the Medicaid contracts with Planned Parenthood.
“The Fifth Circuit’s ruling shows that the district court applied the wrong legal standard,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a press release. “Planned Parenthood’s reprehensible conduct, captured in undercover videos, proves that it is not a ’qualified’ provider under the Medicaid Act, so we are confident we will ultimately prevail.”
“When politicians block access to Planned Parenthood, patients lose vital, life-saving care,” Dr. Leana Wen, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement to The Washington Times.
“Nowhere is that more clear than Texas, where tens of thousands of women and families lost access to birth control, cancer screenings and other reproductive health care when politicians blocked access to Planned Parenthood in 2011.”
As noted in the court’s ruling, Medicaid dollars in Texas do not fund abortions, except for when the life of the mother is endangered or in the case of rape or incest.
Moreover, of the combined $57 million from Planned Parenthood clinics across Texas, only $3.4 million comes from Medicaid contracts.
That means any cancellation of contracts by the state are still a long way from defunding Planned Parenthood.
• Christopher Vondracek can be reached at cvondracek@washingtontimes.com.
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