Supreme Court holds there is no right to taxpayer-funded abortion

Despite the fact that South Carolina had just two Planned Parenthood clinics at the time and that there were over 140 other federally qualified health clinics and pregnancy centers in the the state that were still eligible for the program, one Medicaid recipient claimed that she had had “especially positive experiences” at Planned Parenthood in the past. She planned to “shift all her gynecological and reproductive healthcare” needs to her nearest Planned Parenthood clinic. The state’s decision to exclude Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program, this woman argued, was a constitutional violation of her civil rights.

First passed in 1871, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act empowers people to sue state officials for damages in federal court when state officials deprive them of “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution.” Section 1983 not only became an important tool used by black people in the South to hold state officials accountable for their racist behavior, but it has also been used by Americans of all ethnic backgrounds to hold local officials accountable.

The typical Section 1983 lawsuit today might stem from a police officer’s use of excessive force during an arrest, or a jail official’s indifference to a diabetic patient’s need for insulin, or even the improper firing of a city employee for exercising his or her First Amendment rights.

In Medina, the plaintiff argued that the decision by the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to exclude Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program violated her “right” to receive healthcare from the provider of her choice. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected this preposterous claim.

“New rights for some mean new duties for others,” Gorsuch wrote. “And private enforcement actions, meritorious or not, can force governments to direct money away from public services and spend it on litigation. The job of resolving how best to weigh those competing costs and benefits belongs to the people’s elected representatives, not unelected judges charged with applying the law as they find it.”

This unquestionably reasonable ruling, however, was treated as the second coming of Jim Crow by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “In the wake of the Civil War, the American South was consumed by a wave of terrorist violence designed to disenfranchise and intimidate the country’s newly freed citizens and their allies,” Jackson wrote. “It was precisely because the goals of the 1871 Act were so ambitious that those most committed to the structures it targeted, including many in South Carolina, opposed the measure so vehemently. A century and a half later, the project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws continues.”

THE SOCIALIST FUTURE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Medicaid did not exist until 1965, and abortion was not forced on South Carolina until Roe v. Wade in 1973. It is beyond preposterous to claim that the authors of the Civil Rights Act, who were very much concerned with local officials beating and terrorizing black people, thought they were also creating a taxpayer-funded right to abortion when they wrote Section 1983 into the statute.

The big loser in Medina is Planned Parenthood, the lawyer of which admitted during oral arguments that the organization receives over a third of its money from taxpayers. Conservatives who want to cripple the organization’s ability to perform abortions nationwide should follow South Carolina’s example and label the group an unqualified provider.