A Pennsylvania court on Monday said that the state’s constitution guarantees a right to abortion while striking down a decades-long law banning the use of state Medicaid funds to cover abortion costs. <\/p>\n
The ruling by a divided seven-judge panel of the appellate-level Commonwealth Court is a major victory for Planned Parenthood and abortion clinic operators who first sued Pennsylvania over its Medicaid funding restrictions in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n While the case initially centered over state Medicaid limitations, the stakes significantly expanded after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 ended nearly a half-century of federal abortion protections by overturning Roe v. Wade<\/a>. <\/p>\n The court’s finding on Monday marks the first time that the right to an abortion is protected by the Pennsylvania constitution, joining a handful of states where reproductive rights advocates have found success in protecting abortion access by pointing to state constitutions. <\/p>\n The case could still be appealed to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. <\/p>\n \u201cToday, our Commonwealth Court, looking at the Pennsylvania constitution, held that there is a right to reproductive autonomy, and it\u2019s the highest possible level of a right,\u201d said Susan Frietsche, executive director of the Women’s Law Project, which helped represent the clinics. <\/p>\n A spokesperson for Attorney General David Sunday, a Republican, said the office was reviewing the decision and did not say whether it would appeal. <\/p>\n Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, praised the decision.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve long opposed this unconstitutional ban, and as Governor, I did not defend it \u2014 because a woman\u2019s ability to access reproductive care should never be determined by her income,\u201d Shapiro said in a statement.<\/p>\n In 2019, plaintiffs asked the court to order the state\u2019s Medicaid program to begin covering abortions, without restriction, arguing that a 1982 Pennsylvania law restricting state Medicaid funding violated the constitutional equal protection rights of low-income women.<\/p>\n The case has since taken several turns, with a lower-court ruling in 2021<\/a> that the plaintiffs did not have standing and also saying that they were bound by a state Supreme Court 1985 decision upholding the 1982 law.<\/p>\n