Abortion

Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court signaled Monday it is not anxious to revisit the abortion controversy in the year ahead, disappointing conservative activists who were cheered by the appointment of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

After weeks of debate behind closed doors, a divided court turned down appeals backed by 13 conservative states that sought to defund Planned Parenthood.

The court’s action leaves in place federal court rulings in much of the country that prevent states from denying Medicaid funds to women who go to a Planned Parenthood clinic for healthcare, including medical screenings or birth control. It is already illegal in most cases to use federal money like Medicaid to pay for abortions, but some states wanted to go further, cutting off all Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood because the organization offers the procedure using alternative revenue sources.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch, accused their colleagues of allowing a “politically fraught issue” to justify “abdicating our judicial duty.”

The lower courts are divided on the Medicaid funding dispute, making the high court’s refusal to clarify the issue all the more surprising to some.

“We created the confusion. We should clear it up,” Thomas wrote in Gee vs. Planned Parenthood. “So what explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’ ”

The brief order denying the appeals from Louisiana and Kansas suggests Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Kavanaugh were not willing to hear the cases.

The high court’s refusal to hear an appeal petition is not a ruling, and it will not prevent the justices from taking up the issue in the future or ruling against Planned Parenthood eventually.

Kavanaugh’s vote against hearing the case was noteworthy since it was his first abortion-related case, but it does not necessarily reflect how he would rule in future cases. Many legal experts predict Kavanaugh would vote to restrict or overturn the landmark Roe vs. Wade abortion ruling.

For now, however, the chief justice may have preferred to avoid controversies that result in a 5-4 split along ideological lines, particularly in the aftermath of the fierce partisan fight over Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Last month, Roberts objected to President Trump’s criticism of an “Obama judge” and issued a statement saying, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”

Even so, if the court had agreed to decide the Medicaid dispute, the justices could well have split along the usual conservative versus liberal lines, with the five Bush or Trump appointees on one side and the Clinton and Obama appointees on the other side in dissent.

In their appeals, lawyers for Kansas and Louisiana pointed to a recent split among the U.S. appeals courts. Last year, the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, breaking with others, upheld Arkansas’ decision to cut off funding to Medicaid to Planned Parenthood clinics.

It takes four justices to hear a case, and these appeals were considered in a series of closed-door meetings since late September. But the court’s conservatives were unable to gain the needed fourth vote. Kavanaugh took his seat in the second week of October, and his supporters have assumed he would vote in favor of restricting abortion rights when given the opportunity.

Catherine Foster, president of Americans United for Life, said her group was disappointed with the court’s action. “We join the dissent in calling on the court to do its duty,” she said.

“The pro-life citizens of states like Kansas and Louisiana, through their elected representatives, have clearly expressed their will. They do not want Medicaid tax dollars used to prop up abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion nonprofit. “The pro-life grass roots will not stop fighting until every single tax dollar is untangled from the abortion industry.”

Planned Parenthood called the outcome a victory for patients. “As a doctor, I have seen what’s at stake when people cannot access the care they need, and when politics gets in the way of people making their own healthcare choices,” said Dr. Leana Wen, the group’s president. “We won’t stop fighting for every patient who relies on Planned Parenthood for life-saving, life-changing care.”

In the last decade, conservative states have sought to defund Planned Parenthood because it is the nation’s largest single provider of abortions. None of the Medicaid money pays for abortions, and most of the state funding bans have been blocked by federal judges.

Medicaid is jointly funded by the federal government and the states, and Congress has said its funds may not be used to pay directly for abortions, except when the woman’s life is in danger or in cases of rape or incest. But more than 2 million people go to Planned Parenthood clinics for birth control and general healthcare, including cancer screenings and pregnancy tests. And for low-income women, this healthcare can be paid for through Medicaid.

Republican lawmakers who sponsored the defund laws argue the states should not indirectly subsidize facilities that perform abortions.

But lawyers for Planned Parenthood and their patients have gone to federal courts and won rulings blocking most of the laws from taking effect. They have done so by relying on a provision in the Medicaid Act that says eligible patients may go to any doctor’s office, hospital or clinic that is “qualified to perform” the required medical services. If a federal law creates a right for individuals, plaintiffs like the Planned Parenthood patients may go to court and sue if that right is denied.

But in their appeals, lawyers for Kansas, Louisiana and 13 other states argued that Medicaid is a healthcare spending agreement, not a law that establishes rights for individuals. If so, they said, states may decide who is a qualified provider of healthcare.

The latest from Washington »

More stories from David G. Savage »

[email protected]

Twitter: DavidGSavage

BISMARCK, N.D. — Abortion is again illegal in North Dakota after the state’s Supreme Court on Friday couldn’t muster the required majority to uphold a judge’s ruling that struck down the state’s ban last year.

The law makes it a felony crime for anyone to perform an abortion, though it specifically protects patients from prosecution. Doctors could be prosecuted and penalized by as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Three justices agreed that the ban is unconstitutionally vague. The other two justices said the law is not unconstitutional.

The North Dakota Constitution requires at least four of the five justices to agree for a law to be found unconstitutional, a high bar. Not enough members of the court joined together to affirm the lower court ruling.

In his opinion, Justice Jerod Tufte said the natural rights guaranteed by the state constitution in 1889 do not extend to abortion rights. He also said the law “provides adequate and fair warning to those attempting to comply.”

North Dakota Republican Atty. Gen. Drew Wrigley welcomed the ruling, saying, “The Supreme Court has upheld this important pro-life legislation, enacted by the people’s Legislature. The attorney general’s office has the solemn responsibility of defending the laws of North Dakota, and today those laws have been upheld.”

Republican state Sen. Janne Myrdal, who introduced the 2023 legislation that became the law banning abortion, said she was “thrilled and grateful that two justices that are highly respected saw the truth of the matter, that this is fully constitutional for the mother and for the unborn child and thereafter for that sake.”

The challengers called the decision “a devastating loss for pregnant North Dakotans.”

“As a majority of the Court found, this cruel and confusing ban is incomprehensible to physicians. The ban forces doctors to choose between providing care and going to prison,” Center for Reproductive Rights senior staff attorney Meetra Mehdizadeh said. “Abortion is healthcare, and North Dakotans deserve to be able to access this care without delay caused by confusion about what the law allows.”

The ruling means access to abortion in North Dakota will be outlawed. Even after a judge had struck down the ban last year, the only scenarios for a patient to obtain an abortion in North Dakota had been for life- or health-preserving reasons in a hospital.

The state’s only abortion provider relocated in 2022 from Fargo to nearby Moorhead, Minn.

Justice Daniel Crothers, one of the three judges to vote against the ban, wrote that the district court decision wasn’t wrong.

“The vagueness in the law relates to when an abortion can be performed to preserve the life and health of the mother,” Crothers wrote. “After striking this invalid provision, the remaining portions of the law would be inoperable.”

North Dakota’s newly confirmed ban prohibits the performance of an abortion and declares it a felony. The only exceptions are for rape or incest for an abortion in the first six weeks of pregnancy — before many women know they are pregnant — and to prevent the woman’s death or a “serious health risk” to her.

North Dakota joins 12 other states enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Four others bar it at or around six weeks of gestational age.

Judge Bruce Romanick had struck down the ban the GOP-led Legislature passed in 2023, less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and opened the door to the state-level bans, largely turning the abortion battle to state courts and legislatures.

The Red River Women’s Clinic — the formerly sole abortion clinic in North Dakota — and several physicians challenged the law. The state appealed the 2024 ruling that overturned the ban.

The judge and the Supreme Court each denied requests by the state to keep the abortion ban in effect during the appeal. Those decisions allowed patients with pregnancy complications to seek care without fear of delay because of the law, Mehdizadeh previously said.

Dura writes for the Associated Press.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Sending women who get abortions to prison for decades. Outlawing IUDs. Sharply restricting in vitro fertilization.

These are the strictest abortion prohibitions and punishments in the nation being considered by South Carolina lawmakers, as opponents of the procedure are divided over how far to go.

The bill faces a long legislative path and uncertain prospects, even if it clears the state Senate subcommittee that’s reviewing it.

But the measure up for a second hearing Tuesday would go further than any considered since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022, as abortion remains an unsettled issue in conservative states.

What’s in the bill

The proposal would ban all abortions unless the woman’s life is at risk and eliminates exceptions for rape and incest victims for pregnancies up to 12 weeks. Current law blocks abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is typically six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant.

The proposal would also go further than any other U.S. state. Women who get an abortion and anyone who helps them could face up to 30 years in prison. It appears to ban any contraception that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting. That would ban IUDs and could strictly limit in vitro fertilization.

Providing information about abortions would be illegal, leaving doctors worried they couldn’t suggest legal abortion elsewhere.

OB-GYN Natalie Gregory said passing a bill like this would make so many discussions in her practice — about contraceptives, losing a pregnancy, in vitro fertilization options — a “legal minefield” that could have her risking decades in prison.

“It constitutes a unconstitutional reach that threatens the very fabric of healthcare in our state,” she said during an eight-hour public hearing on the bill last month, adding that the proposal is a waste of time and public money.

The proposal has even split groups that oppose abortion and once celebrated together when South Carolina passed the six-week ban in 2021, a trigger law that took effect after Roe vs. Wade was overturned the next year.

South Carolina Citizens for Life, one of the state’s largest and oldest opponents of abortion, issued a statement the day of last month’s hearing saying it can’t support the bill because women who get abortions are victims too and shouldn’t be punished.

On the other side, at least for this bill, are groups including Equal Protection South Carolina. “Abortion is murder and should be treated as such,” the group’s founder, Mark Corral, said.

Past messaging fuels divide

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis who has written extensively about abortion, said the divide stems from long-standing messaging that labeled abortion murder while avoiding punishment of women.

Ziegler refers to groups pushing for more penalties and restrictions as “abolitionists” and said their success in reshaping laws in conservative states, as well as shifting the broader political climate, has emboldened them to push ideas that don’t appear to have broad public support. They also have enough influence to get lawmakers to listen.

“It’s not going to go away. The trajectory keeps shifting and the abolitionists have more influence,” Ziegler said.

As the nation’s social and political discussions lurch to the right, with debates over whether same-sex marriage should be made illegal again or whether women should work outside the home, Ziegler said it has become easier to push for restrictions that might have never been brought before legislatures before.

“There is more breathing room for abolitionists now,” she said.

The bill’s prospects

A similar House bill last year got a public hearing but went no further. As the subcommittee met, Republican House leaders issued a statement that they were happy with the current state law, and that bill went nowhere.

But things are less certain in the Senate, where nine of the 34 Republicans in the 46-member chamber were elected after the current law was passed. Three of them unseated the Senate’s only Republican women, a trio who called themselves the “Sister Senators” after helping block a stricter abortion ban after Roe was overturned.

Republican Sen. Richard Cash, who sponsors the bill and is one of the Senate’s most resolute voices against abortion, will run Tuesday’s subcommittee. He acknowledged problems last month with potentially banning contraception and restricting the advice doctors can give to patients. But he has not indicated what changes he or the rest of the subcommittee might support. Six of the nine members are Republicans.

GOP Senate leaders said there is no guarantee if the bill passes out of the subcommittee that it goes any further.

“I can say this definitively — there has been not only no decision made to bring up that bill, there’s been no discussion about bringing up that bill,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said.

Collins writes for the Associated Press.

Nov. 11 (UPI) — Senate Republicans have signaled that they are willing to negotiate with Democrats on healthcare subsidies, but are demanding tighter abortion rules on insurance plans.

Senate Republican Leader John Thune described his party’s negotiating position to reporters before the chamber passed a bill on Monday to reopen the government, according to NBC News. Thune’s remarks set the stage for the next partisan fight over expiring health care subsidies that were at the center of the longest government shutdown on record.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sharply criticized the Republican proposal in a floor speech Saturday, calling it “a backdoor national abortion ban.”

“Democrats must dismiss this radical Trojan horse against women’s essential healthcare out of hand,” he said.

Senate Democrats earlier demanded that an extension of pandemic-era enhanced subsidies be included in any government-funding bill. That demand was left out of a funding bill that passed the Senate on Monday and is expected to pass the House.

With no extension of the subsidies in place, individuals who purchase health insurance through Affordable Care Act marketplaces will see steep premium rises — some by thousands of dollars a month — beginning next year.

Republicans have expressed a willingness to negotiate on the enhanced subsidies, but Thune said that in exchange for an extension of the subsidies, Republicans will ask for more stringent enforcement of longstanding restrictions on federal funding being used for abortion, known as the Hyde Amendment.

“A one-year extension along the lines of what [Democrats] are suggesting, and without Hyde protections — doesn’t even get close,” Thune said, according to NBC News.

Wyden said in his floor speech that the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, already bars the use of taxpayer money for abortions.

However, Republicans want to block states from allowing people to access abortions through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces using state or other funding, NBC News reported.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., has indicated he’s open to extending the subsidies, but said Republicans won’t support it without the abortion restrictions.

BALTIMORE — U.S. Catholic bishops elected Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley as their new president on Tuesday, choosing a conservative culture warrior to lead during President Trump’s second term.

The vote serves as a barometer for the bishops’ priorities. In choosing Coakley, they are doubling down on their conservative bent, even as they push for more humane immigration policies from the Trump administration.

Coakley was seen as a strong contender for the top post, having already been elected in 2022 to serve as secretary, the No. 3 conference official. In three rounds of voting, he beat out centrist candidate Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, who was subsequently elected vice president.

Coakley serves as advisor to the Napa Institute, an association for conservative Catholic powerbrokers. In 2018, he publicly supported an ardent critic of Pope Francis, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was later excommunicated for stances that were deemed divisive.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has often been at odds with the Vatican and the inclusive, modernizing approach of the late Pope Francis. His U.S.-born successor, Pope Leo XIV, is continuing a similar pastoral emphasis on marginalized people, poverty and the environment.

The choice of Coakley may fuel tensions with Pope Leo, said Steven Millies, professor of public theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

“In the long conflict between many U.S. bishops and Francis that Leo inherits, this is not a de-escalating step,” he said.

Half the 10 candidates on the ballot came from the conservative wing of the conference. The difference is more in style than substance. Most U.S. Catholic bishops are reliably conservative on social issues, but some — like Coakley — place more emphasis on opposing abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

The candidates were nominated by their fellow bishops, and Coakley succeeds the outgoing leader, Military Services Archbishop Timothy Broglio, for a three-year term. The current vice president, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, was too close to the mandatory retirement age of 75 to assume the top spot.

Coakley edged out a well-known conservative on the ballot, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota’s Winona-Rochester diocese, whose popular Word on Fire ministry has made him a Catholic media star.

In defeating Flores, Coakley won over another strong contender, who some Catholic insiders thought could help unify U.S. bishops and work well with the Vatican. Flores has been the U.S. bishops’ leader in the Vatican’s synod process to modernize the church. As a Latino leading a diocese along the U.S.-Mexico border, he supports traditional Catholic doctrine on abortion and LGBTQ issues and is outspoken in his defense of migrants.

Flores will be eligible for the top post in three years. His election as vice president indicates that the U.S. conference “may eventually, cautiously open itself to the church’s new horizons,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture.

The bishops are crafting a statement on immigration during the annual fall meeting. On many issues, they appear as divided and polarized as their country, but on immigration, even the most conservative Catholic leaders stand on the side of migrants.

The question is how strongly the whole body plans to speak about the Trump administration’s harsh immigration tactics.

Fear of immigration enforcement has suppressed Mass attendance at some parishes. Local clerics are fighting to administer sacraments to detained immigrants. U.S. Catholic bishops shuttered their longstanding refugee resettlement program after the Trump administration halted federal funding for resettlement aid.

“On the political front, you know for decades the U.S. bishops have been advocating for comprehensive immigration reform,” Bishop Kevin Rhoades, of Indiana’s Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese, said during a news conference.

Rhoades serves on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, and he leads the bishops’ committee on religious liberty. He said bishops are very concerned about detained migrants receiving pastoral care and the sacraments.

“That’s an issue of the right to worship,” he said. “One doesn’t lose that right when one is detained, whether one is documented or undocumented.”

The bishops sent a letter to Pope Leo from their meeting, saying they “will continue to stand with migrants and defend everyone’s right to worship free from intimidation.”

The letter continued, “We support secure and orderly borders and law enforcement actions in response to dangerous criminal activity, but we cannot remain silent in this challenging hour while the right to worship and the right to due process are undermined.”

Pope Leo recently called for “deep reflection” in the United States about the treatment of migrants held in detention, saying that “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what is going on right now.”

Stanley writes for the Associated Press.