INDIANAPOLIS —At least for now, Indiana cannot block Planned Parenthood from treating Medicaid patients, a federal judge ruled Friday evening.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt approved Planned Parenthood of Indiana’s request for a preliminary injunction that blocks the state from enforcing a new law intended to prevent government dollars from going to organizations that offer abortions.
She also blocked part of the law that would require doctors to inform women seeking abortions that the fetus can feel pain. Allowed to move forward, though, is a portion that requires doctors to tell those women that human life begins at conception.
Her decision does not permanently overturn Indiana’s law, but does mean the 9,300 Medicaid recipients who visit Planned Parenthood’s 28 clinics in the state can continue to do so until the case is settled.
“This decision will have immediate, positive consequences for our patients and our organization, the state’s largest reproductive health care provider,” said Betty Cockrum, Planned Parenthood of Indiana’s president.
“This ruling means we can resume providing Pap tests, breast exams, STD testing and treatment and birth control to both existing and new Medicaid patients. It also means we can call our two disease intervention specialists who were laid off this week back to work while the permanent injunction we are seeking is pending.”
Pratt wrote that her ruling is based in part on a letter from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that said Indiana’s defunding measure is a violation of federal law.
Though it did not say so specifically, that letter’s implication was that by moving forward, Indiana could jeopardize $5.3 billion annually in federal funds tied to the low-income health insurance program by moving forward.
“If dogma trumps pragmatism and neither side budges, Indiana’s most vulnerable citizens could end up paying the price as the collateral damage of a partisan battle,” Pratt wrote of that possibility.
Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, who is defending the state’s law in court, argued that the letter was just the first step in an administrative process. He noted that the state has the opportunity to appeal, and has done so.
Pratt, though, wrote that the Health and Human Services’ position “must be entitled to some deference, in light of the expertise and institutional knowledge required to administer a complex program governed by a labyrinth of complex laws.”
“To use a sports metaphor, just because the final buzzer has not yet sounded does not mean the court must avert its eyes from the scoreboard,” she wrote.
Bryan Corbin, a spokesman for Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, said the state will likely appeal to have the U.S. 7th Circuit Court take the case over.
That, he said, is “the same court that would ultimately review the administrative appeal of Indiana’s Medicaid plan in the dispute between the state of Indiana and the federal government.”
The judge also blocked the enforcement of another provision of House Enrolled Act 1210, which was intended as a broad anti-abortion measure.
The law would require doctors to inform women seeking abortions verbally and in writing that the fetus can feel pain.
Pratt, though, said forcing doctors to comply with that provision would violate their First Amendment rights.
“Where the state’s interest is to disseminate an ideology, no matter how acceptable to some, such interest cannot outweigh an individual’s First Amendment right to avoid becoming the courier for such message,” she wrote.
She did not include in the injunction a portion of the law that requires doctors to tell women seeking abortions that human life begins at conception.
She also said no back payments are owed to Planned Parenthood of Indiana for Medicaid patients treated using $100,000 in private donations during the weeks that the law was being enforced.