Court rules against Planned Parenthood in Texas ‘sting videos’ case, bringing it a step closer to getting defunded

By Meagan Flynn January 18 at 7:26 AM

When Texas tried to kick Planned Parenthood out of the state’s Medicaid program based on “sting" videos produced by undercover antiabortion activists, a federal judge in Austin said the whole case sounded more as if it belonged in a “best-selling novel.”

“Yet, rather than a villain plotting to take over the world, the subject of this case is the State of Texas’s efforts to expel a group of health care providers from a social health care program for families and individuals with limited resources,” U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks wrote in February 2017.

Sparks was skeptical. Texas contended the videos showed Planned Parenthood discussing the illegal sale of fetal tissue of aborted babies, an interpretation Planned Parenthood has disputed. Sparks, in turn, said the state had not produced “even a scintilla of evidence” suggesting Planned Parenthood should be disqualified from Medicaid based on the videos.


But on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said Sparks is the one who had it all wrong. The three-judge panel found he used the incorrect standard of review, vacating Sparks’s 2017 preliminary injunction that had blocked Texas from defunding Planned Parenthood, and remanding the case back to the district court for further review.

The ruling from the 5th Circuit effectively gives weight to the sting videos and the conclusions Texas reached based on them in a way the court hasn’t offered before. It comes one month after the Supreme Court left in place a previous ruling by the 5th Circuit in favor of Planned Parenthood. In that case, the 5th Circuit rejected Louisiana’s effort to defund the health-care provider that had been based in part on the sting videos, mostly because the state hadn’t cited the videos in writing when announcing its decision to terminate the Planned Parenthood contract and lacked other adequate reasoning. (The Supreme Court also declined to hear a similar effort from Kansas.)

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