OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
7:53 AM – Saturday, July 4, 2026
Planned Parenthood and some smaller abortion providers are allowed to begin billing Medicaid for some services after being cut off from taxpayer funds for a year.
Medicaid billing access resumed on Sunday after Congress missed the deadline to extend President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which mandated the defunding of abortion providers when it was signed into law on July 4, 2025.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) attempted to extend Planned Parenthood’s funding cut with an amendment to the budget resolution in April, but the Senate voted it down, according to Politico. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) voted alongside Democrats in opposition to the amendment.
Over the past year, Planned Parenthood said its affiliates closed nearly 30 of its about 600 clinics, carried out about 20% fewer breast cancer examinations and distributed about 25% fewer birth control pill packages than the previous year. It cited a lack of federal funding as a primary reason for the changes.
Angela Vasquez-Giroux, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, also said the cuts led to limited abortion access in some places, including in Wisconsin.
The restored government funding does not mean that all services that were cut will return, as the federal Hyde Amendment bans Medicaid funds from covering most abortions, with exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest or endanger the life of the mother. Hyde generally applies to abortion procedures as well as abortion drugs, including mifepristone and misoprostol.
Maine Family Planning, a smaller, rural clinic, also closed three primary care clinics because it met the criteria in the law: it was a non-profit family planning organization that provided abortion and received more than $800,000 yearly in Medicaid reimbursements.
Pro-Life advocates renewed their push for Congress to defund abortion clinics this week.
“They’ve defunded Big Abortion before and they should do everything in their power to do it again,” said Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, on Monday.
Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins called on President Donald Trump and the Republican-majority legislature to defund Planned Parenthood “for good,” during a speech in late June at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference.
She warned that if “the Senate fails to renew last year’s defunding of Planned Parenthood by July 4th,” then the organization “stands to gain more than $600 million of our taxpayer dollars.” She also cautioned the Republican Party against taking Pro-Life voters for granted in the next election cycle, expressing her expectation for GOP politicians to take action against the practice.
“This week we started our week at Students for Life on the picket line in front of the RNC [Republican National Committee] headquarters here in town, not because we’re anyone’s enemy, because we wanted to remind the Party that we all belong to that we have to see a return on our investments,” she said in her June speech. “We want to keep this coalition together for November.”
On Sunday, in response to Congress’ failure to meet its deadline, Hawkins stated, “Congress must act, and the Trump Administration should permanently debar Planned Parenthood from all federal funding.”
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