(LifeSiteNews) — A three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals with the Biden administration’s decision in a 2-1 vote to withhold $7 million in Title X family planning funds from Tennessee over the pro-life state’s refusal to subsidize counseling for abortions.
Since restoring the abortion industry’s access to Title X funds in 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has moved to declare multiple states “out of compliance” with the program over their pro-life policies, redirecting the money they would have received to groups such as Planned Parenthood.
Last year, Tennessee became the first of those states, with HHS citing its failure to require counseling on “infant care, foster care, adoption, or pregnancy termination, which are all required to be provided upon request” and giving the $7 million to Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi instead.
Tennessee sued over the “federal government’s latest effort to coerce states into carrying out pro-abortion policy in violation of statutory, constitutional, and administrative-law limits,” but now the 6th Circuit panel has sided with HHS, Live Action reported. The judges determined that the state could not “dictate” federal grant eligibility to the federal government, and that while abortion itself was illegal in Tennessee, providing information about it was not.
Passed as a trigger law in 2019, Tennessee’s Human Life Protection Act went into effect in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It criminalizes all abortions except those deemed necessary to save the life of the mother or “to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” Since then, Tennessee has given millions of dollars to pregnancy centers that offer free care and life-affirming abortion alternatives, and required fetal development videos be shown in public schools.
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
The Biden administration has touted a “whole-of-government effort to protect reproductive rights” (a popular euphemism for legal abortion-on-demand), including increased taxpayer funding for abortion at home and abroad and waiving federal safety rules against distributing abortion pills by mail. President Joe Biden has called on Democrats to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again” if the fall elections elect Vice President Kamala Harris and give her enough votes in Congress to codify a nationwide “right” to abortion.