Say what you will — and there’s plenty to be said — about the constitutional wobbliness of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, but this much must also be said: They’re real Catholics, not fake ones like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.
We got a sense of this three years ago, when the duo stood up for babies and helped strike down the half-century-old abomination known as Roe v. Wade. Further evidence of their support for the unborn came yesterday when the duo joined fellow Catholics Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh — along with Catholic-turned-Episcopalian Neil Gorsuch — in ruling 6-3 that South Carolina can block Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. (The only Catholic apostate was, predictably, Sonia Sotomayor, who continues to believe that the leftist sacrament of abortion trumps the Church’s 2,000-year-old teaching that abortion is a “moral evil.”)
Specifically, the High Court’s decision in this case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood, makes it easier for states (read: easier for red states) to boot Planned Parenthood clinics out of their Medicaid programs if their citizens don’t like the idea that their tax dollars are funding such a barbaric procedure, and it made it harder for pro-abortion forces to sue those states for honoring the life-affirming will of their citizens. And since more than three-fourths of abortions are undergone by low-income women, the decision is a serious financial throat punch to the entity that can be aptly understood as the Amazon.com of abortions.
Notably, the ruling didn’t address the legality of South Carolina’s decision, so the pro-abortion Left will likely regroup and fight another day on this other front. As Justice Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion:
Private enforcement does not always benefit the public, not least because it requires states to divert money and attention away from social services and toward litigation. And balancing those costs and benefits poses a question of public policy that, under our system of government, only Congress may answer. … After all, the decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy. New rights for some mean new duties for others. … The job of resolving how best to weigh those competing costs and benefits belongs to the people’s elected representatives, not unelected judges charged with applying the law as they find it.
The timing of the ruling is particularly delicious, given that Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act has Medicaid in its crosshairs. The OBBBA proposes a massive haircut to the jointly state- and federal-funded program, which was created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called Great Society but which has since become riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse. Medicaid was originally meant to be a social safety net for mostly low-income Americans, but the behemoth program now embodies all that’s wrong with Democrat do-gooding in particular and Big Government “solutions” in general.
As for Planned Parenthood, its wickedly euphemistic name is — along with Affirmative Action, the Affordable Care Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Democratic Party — a first-ballot hall-of-famer in terms of deceptive advertising. Indeed, the organization likely wouldn’t exist were it not for its spectacular efficiency in killing the unborn while shielding prospective mothers from the life-taking calamity of the procedure.
When it comes to abortion, Planned Parenthood is insatiable — so much so that it continually lies to the American people about the proportion of its services dedicated to abortion versus, say, those dedicated to tests for pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. Because of this reluctance to come clean, Planned Parenthood is also lying about the amount of federal funding it gets for abortion.
Which is why yesterday’s ruling is so meaningful. The Supreme Court has, in essence, ruled that taxpayer funds can’t be used for abortion in states that don’t support such use. And that’s a big win for life, and a big win for babies.
