WICHITA, Kan. — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Kansas to restore federal family planning funds to a Dodge City clinic that claims it is "collateral damage" to a new law aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood, saying that the U.S. Constitution trumps state law.
U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten granted the request from the unaffiliated Dodge City Family Planning Clinic and ordered the state to immediately pay the clinic. He rejected a state request for a $100,000 bond, calling it "mean-spirited" because they knew the clinic, whose employees have been working without pay, could not meet it.
Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri and the unaffiliated Dodge City clinic are challenging a law requiring the state to first allocate Title X monies to public health departments and hospitals, leaving no fund for specialty family planning clinics. They argue that under the Supremacy Clause Kansas cannot impose further restrictions on a federal program.
Marten had previously blocked enforcement of the new law in August and ordered Kansas to keep funding Planned Parenthood. An appeal of that temporary injunction related to the Planned Parenthood funding is pending before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
When the state then refused to also fund the smaller, unaffiliated Dodge City clinic, the attorneys for American Civil Liberties Union sued to intervene in the case on its behalf. Marten allowed them to join the lawsuit and fast tracked their request seeking a temporary ruling over the funding issue after the Dodge City clinic contended it would be forced to close within weeks without it.
Kansas contends it has a sovereign right to decide how to distribute the federal grant money it receives.
At the crux of the dispute is a new law requiring the state to first allocate some federal family planning money to public health departments and hospitals, which leaves no funds for specialty clinics. The money comes under Title X of the Public Health Services Act, which Congress passed to promote family planning services to low-income patients because it found the lack of access to birth control services exacerbates poverty.
The only entities affected by the new law were Planned Parenthood Kansas and Mid-Missouri's clinics in Wichita and Hays, and the unaffiliated Dodge City clinic. None of those clinics provides abortion services. Planned Parenthood's only clinic that provides abortion services in Kansas is in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, and it does not receive the federal family planning funding.
The Dodge City Family Planning Clinic argued that without the Title X funding it would be forced to close, leaving 650 mostly low-income patients without access to reproductive health care services. The clinic, which had received Title X funding for the past 35 years, contends about a third of its low-income patients receive free medical services and another third qualify for a 50 percent discount..
But the state countered that those patients in southwest Kansas would still have access to a full array of medical services elsewhere. It notes that 37 Kansas counties do not a delegated Title X agency within its county limits.
Kansas told the appeals court that Marten's ruling "emasculates the state of Kansas' autonomy and sovereignty rights" in the Eleventh Amendment. The state contends the new law restricting the distribution of federal family planning funds does not target Planned Parenthood because the statute itself does not name the group or even mention abortion.