Arkansas Attorney General Rutledge joined Ohio and 10 other states in challenging the Biden Administration’s decision to direct taxpayer funds to entities that encourage and perform abortions.
The Title X Family Planning Program is a federal grant program focused on providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and preventative health services. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently repealed a 2019 rule that built walls to prevent the funding of abortions with taxpayer money—which remains illegal.
“This regulatory flip-flop is just another example of President Biden’s non-stop assault on America’s unborn children,” said Attorney General Rutledge. “It is important that we stand together to protect the lives of the unborn and ensure that no taxpayer dollars fund abortions.”
This lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Southern District of Ohio, seeks to reinstate HHS’s rule made in 2019 that required federally funded family planning clinics to (1) be physically and financially independent of abortion clinics and (2) refrain from referring patients for abortions. These rules were promulgated in order to prevent federal tax dollars from being used to peddle abortions in public family planning clinics.
Attorney General Rutledge has vigorously fought to make Arkansas the most prolife state. She asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review an Arkansas law banning discrimination against unborn children with Down syndrome through selective abortion. She has opposed efforts to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which would let Congress use tax dollars to fund abortion.
She successfully defended Arkansas’s moratorium on certain abortions to preserve scarce medical equipment in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she continues to defend a variety of Arkansas’s prolife laws, including Arkansas’s ban on gruesome dismemberment abortions and attacks by out-of-state interest groups like the ACLU.
Along with Arkansas, the other states that joined Ohio’s challenge are Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
