The Budget as a Barrage: A Direct Assault on Women’s Healthcare

In a nation purportedly committed to individual liberty and well-being, a disturbing new front has opened in the relentless assault on women’s healthcare. The Felonious Punk administration’s recently enacted “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed into law on July 4, 2025, contains a provision that, while seemingly couched in legislative technicalities, constitutes a profound and direct attack on women’s fundamental right to choose their healthcare provider and access essential medical services. For millions of women across the country, this is not merely a policy change; it is an act of calculated harm.

The provision, now codified as law, mandates a one-year ban on state Medicaid payments to any healthcare nonprofit that both offers legal abortion services and receives more than $800,000 in federal funding in 2023. While the bill notably avoids explicit naming, its criteria are so precisely tailored that it targets almost exclusively Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its member health centers, alongside Maine Family Planning. This isn’t a broad, equitable restructuring of healthcare funding; it is a surgical strike designed to punish and dismantle, driven by a decades-long ideological campaign.

Planned Parenthood, a venerable institution that has served generations of American women, views this measure as an unconstitutional “naked attempt to leverage the government’s spending power to attack and penalize” them for providing lawful medical services. They correctly point out that federal law (the Hyde Amendment) already prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions, a mandate they scrupulously follow. This new provision, then, is not about ensuring federal funds don’t pay for abortions; it is about weaponizing funding to coerce and eliminate comprehensive healthcare providers because they also offer a legal, if controversial, service.

The immediate fallout of this attack has been swift and profound. Planned Parenthood wasted no time in challenging the law, filing a lawsuit on July 7 against the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Health and Human Services. In a critical early victory for women’s health, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a temporary restraining order just hours later, blocking the implementation of these cuts for 14 days. This temporary reprieve underscores the legal vulnerabilities of the administration’s maneuver, but the very necessity of such legal intervention highlights the immediate threat. Disturbingly, even in the brief period before the injunction, some Planned Parenthood health centers “have already been forced to turn away patients who use Medicaid to get basic sexual and reproductive health care.”

The human cost of this policy is staggering and cannot be overstated. Planned Parenthood estimates that over one million patients nationwide rely on their clinics for essential, Medicaid-covered services, including vital contraception, life-saving cancer screenings, and critical STI testing and treatment. If this provision were to stand, nearly 200 clinics – approximately one-third of Planned Parenthood’s national footprint – are at risk of closure. The vast majority of these vulnerable clinics, over 90 percent, are situated in “blue states” where abortion remains legal, placing the immediate burden squarely on states that have actively worked to protect reproductive freedom.

Consider the lived experiences of women facing this assault. Nurse practitioner Anne Logan Bass, serving Planned Parenthood affiliates across Virginia, West Virginia, and the Carolinas, recounted the heartbreaking conversations with patients navigating complex health issues like infertility stemming from undiagnosed STIs. In rural Maine, nurse Christina Theriault’s clinic, a lifeline for basic gynecological and reproductive health, faces financial ruin. Without her, patients in a county the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined would face grueling “two to four hour” drives for basic care – a logistical impossibility for many low-income women who lack transportation or the luxury of taking hours off work. These are not abstract statistics; these are real women, real lives, directly jeopardized by a political agenda that prioritizes ideological purity over public health.

The provision forces Planned Parenthood and other providers, like Maine Family Planning, into an impossible, “heart-wrenching choice.” As independent affiliates, they must decide whether to continue offering legal abortion services (which are funded through private donations, not federal funds) and risk losing critical Medicaid reimbursements for all other services, or cease abortion care to preserve funding for contraception, cancer screenings, and STI treatment. Despite immense financial pressure, including an estimated $70-$75 million in federal Medicaid payments for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte in California alone, national leadership has vociferously affirmed: “There is not now, and has never been, a plan to stop providing abortion care in the hopes of preserving federal funding. Any claims to the contrary are an outright lie.”

This legislation is a significant victory for anti-abortion groups, which have framed it as ending “taxpayer funding of the abortion industry.” However, this framing is disingenuous; federal law has long prohibited federal funding for abortions. What this bill does do, instead, is weaponize funding to cut off a broad spectrum of vital healthcare services to women, particularly those with low incomes who disproportionately rely on Medicaid. It is a clear, aggressive escalation in the post-Dobbs landscape, leveraging the reversal of Roe v. Wade further to dismantle reproductive health access on a national scale.

This is an attack on women. It is an assault on their autonomy, their access to comprehensive medical care, and their well-being. It is a policy that sacrifices the health and safety of millions of women on the altar of political ideology. The repercussions of this legislative act will not merely be economic or statistical; they will be deeply personal, profoundly detrimental, and felt in every community where women seek to control their own healthcare decisions and live healthy lives.