Pennsylvania Abortion Providers File State Lawsuit Challenging Medicaid Abortion Coverage Ban
Plaintiffs allege the abortion ban violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Equal Rights Amendment
PENNSYLVANIA – Represented by attorneys from the Women’s Law Project; attorney David S. Cohen; Planned Parenthood Federation of America; and the private law firm Pepper Hamilton LLP, a group of Pennsylvania abortion providers filed a lawsuit today challenging a state statute that bans abortion coverage through the Pennsylvania Medicaid program. The case, Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, was filed in Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, and its central claims are that the abortion coverage ban violates the Equal Rights Amendment and equal protection provisions of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Under current state law, Medicaid can cover abortion only if the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest, or the abortion is necessary to avert the death of the pregnant woman. Sixteen states including New Jersey, New York, and Delaware allow Medicaid to cover abortion.
“Pennsylvania’s ban on Medicaid coverage of abortion is a decades-long injustice that deprives low-income women of reproductive health care in violation of the state Constitution’s Equal Rights Amendment,” says Susan J. Frietsche, senior staff attorney at the Women’s Law Project. “The coverage ban discriminates on the basis of sex because Medicaid comprehensively covers men’s health care but not women’s. It inflicts severe harm on women because of their reproductive capacity, and it does so in service to discredited sex-role stereotypes that continue to limit women’s equal participation in society.”
“Restrictions on abortion coverage have a shameful and disproportionate impact on low-income women, Black women and women of color, immigrant women, young women, and families who have to travel long distances in order to access the care they need,” says Lexi White, Policy Director for New Voices for Reproductive Justice. “Black women in Pennsylvania constitute 11 percent of women but account for 31 percent of all pregnancy-related deaths, the direct result of harmful barriers to our coverage and care.”
The Pennsylvania Legislature has a long history of unconstitutionally interfering in women’s healthcare. Specifically, they have attempted to force married women to notify their husbands before having an abortion, criminalize abortion at arbitrary points during pregnancy, and ban the safest and most common second-trimester abortion method by threatening to jail doctors.
This tradition of political interference has helped create a landscape where 90% of Pennsylvania counties do not have an abortion provider, creating logistical obstacles to abortion access that work in tandem with the unconstitutional Medicaid abortion ban.
Under these conditions, networks made up of abortion fund organizations, individual volunteers, and in-house patient-care coordinators work to help patients navigate financial and logistical obstacles to safe legal abortion. The need for such networks, which men do not need to access healthcare in Pennsylvania, highlights the gap between a constitutional right and the reality of abortion access for low-income women in Pennsylvania.\
Research shows one in four women seeking abortion care who cannot overcome the lack of Medicaid funding will be forced into carrying her pregnancy to term and giving birth against her will.
The medical risk of coerced childbearing is significant: the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed country. Here in Pennsylvania, while many lawmakers have been obsessed with passing abortion restrictions, they have allowed the maternal mortality rate to double since 1994. Like everywhere else, maternal and infant mortality rates are much higher for Black women and infants than their white counterparts.
“Every day women call us looking for help because they are being forced to choose between necessities and the abortion she needs,” says Elicia Gonzales of Women’s Medical Fund, an organization that exists to connect patients in need with the funding to pay for abortion. “We hear from women who go without diapers for their children, skip meals, and turn the heat off in their homes all because politicians banned Medicaid from covering a safe, legal, common procedure. The entire purpose of Medicaid is to prevent people from having to choose between health care and necessities like food and heat.”
Specifically, the lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services to comply with the state Constitution by covering abortion through Medicaid and reversing the 1985 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision in Fischer v. Department of Public Welfare.
Case documents:
Affidavit – Terri-Ann Thompson, PhD, Ibis Reproductive Health
Affidavit – Sarah Noble, MD, MPH, Board-certified psychologist based in Pennsylvania
Affidavit – Courtney Schreiber, MD, MPH, Division Chief and Medical
Director at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Affidavit – Colleen Heflin, Professor of Public Administration and International
Affairs and a Senior Research Associate in the Center for Policy Research at the
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University
Affidavit – Elicia Gonzales, Executive Director, Women’s Medical Fund
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