The Trump administration restored federal funding for family planning after an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, the ACLU said Wednesday, following officials’ agreement to return money that had been paused for investigation.
The ACLU said it had dropped its legal challenge against the Trump administration after the restoration. The case had targeted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ decision to pause millions of dollars of federal funding for family planning, contraception and other services linked to Title X.
The ACLU sued HHS last year after federal officials alerted 16 organizations, including Planned Parenthood affiliates, that the department was pausing $27.5 million to investigate whether the groups were complying with the law. At the time, HHS did not specify which laws or executive orders it believed the organizations were suspected of violating.
In a Dec. 19 letter to the organizations, HHS cited “federal civil rights laws” and said the groups had taken actions showing they were in compliance. The letter also reminded them of their “ongoing obligation to comply with all terms of the award, including by not engaging in any unlawful diversity, equity or inclusion-related discrimination in violation of such laws.”
The ACLU filed to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit on Jan. 13. An email seeking comment to HHS was sent on Wednesday.
The dispute has played out against a broader backdrop of policy changes since Trump took office, including executive orders targeting programs that consider race in any way, some of which have been put on hold by judges.
Republicans have long criticized the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow each year under the Title X program to Planned Parenthood and its clinics. The article said the program provides services mainly to low-income women, many of them from minority communities, and that federal law prohibits taxpayer dollars from paying for most abortions.
The ACLU said that when HHS withheld 22 federal Title X grants last spring, 865 family planning service sites were unable to provide services to an estimated 842,000 patients across nearly two dozen states.
Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at the ACLU of the District of Columbia, said, “We should never have had to sue to protect essential health care like cancer screenings, STI tests, and birth control,” adding that “Restoring funding is a victory, but the larger fight to protect everyone’s reproductive freedom continues.”
Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the Reproductive Freedom Project at the ACLU, said in a statement that while funding has been restored, “we know that the Trump administration will continue to attack reproductive freedom, and the ACLU will be ready to use every lever we have to fight those attacks and defend the Title X program.”