By Dave Andrusko
On Tuesday the Missouri Supreme Court jumped in again on behalf of state-funding of the abortion industry. On a 6-1 vote, the court said House Bill 2011, which is the Department of Social Services appropriations bill for the fiscal 2019 year is unconstitutional. The effect is to force Missouri taxpayers to fund Planned Parenthood’s abortion facility to the tune of millions of dollars.
Gerard Nieters, Legislative Director of Missouri Right to Life, harshly criticized the decision as “yet another case of liberal activist judges substituting their opinion for that of the legislature.”
“The Missouri legislature clearly stated in its 2019 appropriations bill that its Medicaid Family Planning funds not be paid to abortion providers or its affiliates,” Nieters said. “But the court claimed that the prohibition of the payment of funds to Planned Parenthood and its affiliates was unconstitutional. Thus, Missourian’s tax dollars will continue to indirectly fund abortions via Family Planning payments. ”
The bill specifically reads, “No funds shall be expended to any abortion facility as defined in Section 188.015, or any affiliate or associate thereof.”
The court’s decision comes on the heels of a June 25 decision by a state administrative hearing judge that Missouri’s lone abortion provider had demonstrated it meets the requirements for renewal of its license.
Administrative Hearing Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi agreed with Planned Parenthood that the state had “cherry-picked” a small handful of cases to make the case that the Planned Parenthood Reproductive Health Services of the St. Louis Region did not warrant renewal of its license.
The state countered that the abortion clinic had failed to address a number of serious deficiencies found by the state during an annual inspection, including botched abortions.
For example, in a story written by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson about Dandamudi’s decision, we read
A March 2019 inspection, for example, found that a woman had undergone an abortion that took five attempts to complete. The health department investigated other instances when women underwent multiple procedures to complete an abortion and found four.
In one of the cases, the patient had to return for a second procedure because, Dandamudi wrote, it was likely she was pregnant with twins and only one had been aborted. Planned Parenthood officials said the other twin might have been missed because the patient was “morbidly obese.”
Nieters vowed that “Missouri Right to Life will continue to work with the Missouri legislature to insure that future Missouri moneys not be paid to abortion providers. Be assured that we will continue the fight to protect the lives of unborn babies and the health of their mothers.”