A Trump administration proposal to bar federally funded family planning facilities from providing or referring patients for abortions is aimed at forcing organizations like Planned Parenthood to make a simple choice: cease offering abortion services or lose some of their government money.
But the proposed rules, which the Department of Health and Human Services submitted Thursday night, have raised complicated questions about the fate of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health organizations that provide both family planning and abortion services — and the potential health effects on women who depend on such providers for basic care.
At issue are the regulations surrounding Title X, the 1970 law that created the federal family planning program. The statute already bans direct funding of abortion, but many organizations that provide abortions, including Planned Parenthood, use Title X money to subsidize other women’s health services, such as dispensing birth control and providing cancer screenings. The proposal — a top priority of social conservatives who are staunch supporters of President Trump — seeks to end that commingling, or at least make it more difficult for reproductive health providers to do both.
To qualify for Title X money under the new policy, an organization would have to have “a bright line of physical as well as financial separation” between family planning programs and facilities where abortion is “performed, supported, or referred for as a method of family planning,”