On July 28, Democracy Forward, on behalf of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for attacking Title X funding applications. It comes as the Department for Health and Human Services, or HHS, announced that as of 2027, Title X funding would favor fertility tracking over contraceptives, counsel patients about “marriage prior to childbearing,” respect “biological reality” around sex and gender, and a slew of other funding considerations that undermine Title X’s science-backed mandate to provide accessible reproductive healthcare.
The language deployed by the HHS reflects a new wave of anti-abortion rhetoric that converges with the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, camp to increasingly demonize hormonal birth control and reproductive healthcare as “unnatural” and a symbol of moral bankruptcy. As Planned Parenthood is in its fifth year of Title X’s five-year funding cycle, the funding shift puts millions of Americans at risk.
Trump’s MAGA administration has repeatedly attempted to undermine and defund reproductive healthcare, with roughly 200 Planned Parenthood Centers at risk of closure amid abortion bans and widespread funding cuts. The lawsuit alleges the administration is “misusing the Title X program for an overtly political and ideological agenda,” and that reproductive healthcare organizations that continue to offer full-service reproductive healthcare (like Planned Parenthood) will be unjustly penalized. Now, the 1.3 million low-income, uninsured, and underinsured Americans who receive Planned Parenthood care through Title X funding every year—with contraceptive counseling, STD screenings and treatment, and cancer screenings being some of the most popular services—are at risk of losing access to vital healthcare. However, if successful, the lawsuit would force the Trump administration to walk back the politicization of Title X for all reproductive healthcare providers across America.
They're coming for all of it - abortions, birth control, STD screenings, cancer treatments, all of it.
@foggy@lemmy.world is right. They won't stop at women's healthcare. This affects all of us.