BY CLINT COMBS
Lauren Gray was cut off from her mother after becoming pregnant while in college. Julie Edwards, a Medicaid recipient from South Carolina living with Type 1 diabetes, needed birth control. Their stories may seem random, but consider how Republicans are gutting Medicaid and Reproductive Rights.
Gray couldn’t travel three hours to the nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic so she called a pregnancy center close to campus and said, “I would like to have an abortion but I don’t know exactly what that looks like.” Edwards said she preferred Planned Parenthood for “gynecological care but needed Medicaid coverage,” court records say.
After speaking with staff at the “pregnancy center,” Gray grew jaded, later telling the AP, ”I don’t want more women deceived by these fake women’s health centers.” Edwards found a judgement-free clinic that was able to provide her health services at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic (PPSAT).
Gray was able to ditch the pregnancy center, but things went south for Edwards.
South Carolina’s Governor Henry McMaster directed the state’s Department of Health and Human Services to cut Planned Parenthood from its list of approved Medicaid providers. Edwards and Planned Parenthood sued state officials under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (aka the Ku Klux Klan Act), arguing that the state violated federal Medicaid law by unlawfully restricting access to qualified providers. Two lower courts sided with Edwards blocking Gov. McMaster from removing Planned Parenthood from Medicaid.
However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned those rulings, deciding that Medicaid beneficiaries do not have the right under the Civil Rights Act provision to sue states over provider choice. Just a week later, President Donald Trump signed a budget bill cutting
$1 trillion from Medicaid.
These decisions could have far-reaching impacts on reproductive care, as Medicaid covered nearly half of all U.S. births in 2024, according to the CDC. With Planned Parenthood clinics defunded and Medicaid access shrinking, more low-income patient may be forced to seek care from providers that often do not offer comprehensive or unbiased reproductive health services. This is especially true in Minnesota, where crisis pregnancy centers outnumber brick-and-mortar_abortion clinics 11 to one.
“I mean, when you just look at Medicaid alone, there’s a staggering number, I think it’s 40% of pregnancies in the United States, that are paid for by people who use Medicaid dollars,” said Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and founder of Abortion Access Front.
Minnesota Republican state lawmakers tried and failed to pass House File 25, which would dole out $6 million to crisis pregnancy centers over two years. Kristin Bahner, DFL State Representative from District 37B, warned that many of these centers could violate patient privacy laws. “Many of these clinics are not subject to HIPAA regulation,” Bahner said. “But the reality is we’re not talking about how we are not protecting the data and the privacy of the women using these services.”
“Regardless of your views on reproductive healthcare, we should all agree that privacy is a basic human right, and that consumers deserve transparency, Rindala Alajaji, from the Legislative Activists for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said “Our elected officials have a responsibility to ensure that personal information, especially our sensitive medical data, is protected.”
“They are not medical facilities. They do not provide medical care,” Winstead cautioned. “Let’s be clear. They do not provide anything.”
Last May, Planned Parenthood North Central States announced that its affiliated clinics in Alexandria, Apple Valley, Bemidji and Richfield would close after the Trump Administration froze $2.8 million in federal funds for clinics to provide birth control, STI testing and cervical cancer screenings.
“We have been fighting to hold together an unsustainable infrastructure as the landscape shifts around us and an onslaught of attacks continues,” CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States Ruth Richardson wrote in a statement. “We know that many of our patients would have nowhere to turn if every Planned Parenthood health center were to disappear from their state.”
“When you start to talk about the CPCs or the crisis pregnancy centers, one of the significant differences between us as a healthcare provider is that we actually provide healthcare, and these crisis pregnancy centers don’t provide access to actual health care,” Richardson said.
The Minnesota Abortion Action Committee (MNAAC), a volunteer-run abortion rights organization often stages protests outside crisis pregnancy centers. The group is also increasingly concerned that Israel’s bombing of hospitals has contributed to a maternal and reproductive health crisis in Gaza, turning the U.S.-backed assault on women’s healthcare into an international issue.
On Aug. 6, MNAAC members took their protest to the Tandem Family Resource Center on Chicago Avenue in an effort to expose fake clinics.
“They prey on vulnerable people who lack access to quality medical care, material resources and social support,” Liz McAlister said wearing a black and white keffiyeh. “CPCs promote dangerous interventions like abortion reversals, which, for the record, is not a thing.”
