A federal district judge has made permanent a temporary injunction he issued in May to keep Ohio from implementing a law that would have cut about $1.5 million in funding for Planned Parenthood in the state. Ohio officials have said they will appeal. Darrell Rowland reports:
The agency has “established that if the enforcement of (the new law) is not permanently enjoined, plaintiffs will suffer a continuing irreparable injury for which there is no adequate remedy at law,” said Judge Michael R. Barrett of U.S. District Court in Cincinnati.
The law stripping about $1.5 million from Planned Parenthood was to have taken effect in May. But the judge, who already slapped a preliminary injunction preventing the law from taking effect, declared the measure violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, said, “This is the latest in a series of stinging court defeats for John Kasich and his anti-abortion agenda. State legislators need to stop attacking Planned Parenthood and abortion access because they are going to lose."
Although Planned Parenthood is not named specifically in the law, the organization would have been barred from receiving public funds for being an entity that performs or promotes abortions. The law also would have prohibited public funding of any organization that contracted with an entity that performs abortions, redirecting the money, most of it federal, to other clinics. But, critics argue, most of the clinics on Ohio’s list of alternatives do not provide the services to low-income women that Planned Parenthood clinics do.
Only three of Ohio’s 28 Planned Parenthood operations actually perform abortions, about a third of the state’s total of some 21,000 such procedures performed annually. In its lawsuit, Planned Parenthood’s attorneys claimed the law would deny it funding "in retaliation for" providing abortions. The bulk of Planned Parenthood’s clinics’ efforts are devoted to HIV testing, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and the prevention of violence against women.
Once again, the forced birthers have proved that for all their talk about protecting women, they don’t really care about women’s health and well-being.
It’s encouraging this year to see federal courts telling lawmakers that at least some of their machinations designed to curtail women’s reproductive rights aren’t going to fly.