U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks has granted a preliminary injunction to six state Planned Parenthood affiliates suing the Texas Dept. of Health over a budget rider that denies federal family-planning funding to abortion providers. Sparks’ 36-page decision, issued Monday, Aug. 4, suspends Rider 8, a provision in the state appropriations bill passed in May that would have denied at least $13 million to 33 Planned Parenthood clinics across the state. Only seven of those clinics provide abortions; the others offer family planning, breast- and cervical-cancer screenings, Pap smears, and other health care services to 115,000 low-income women each year.

Originally set to goes into effect Sept. 1, Rider 8 — authored by Republican state Sens. Steve Ogden of Bryan and Tommy Williams of The Woodlands — now can’t be implemented until the conclusion of Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit, filed in late June. The affiliates also got a temporary restraining order from Sparks, allowing them to skirt TDH’s requirement that they either sign an affidavit promising to halt abortions or immediately lose their public funding.

Planned Parenthood argues that the new rule imposes an additional eligibility requirement on family-planning funding that is not enforced by the feds. The state attorney general’s office hasn’t announced whether it will appeal Sparks’ decision. A preliminary injunction, the judge wrote, is an “extraordinary remedy” that should be granted only if the plaintiff “clearly” shows that its case is likely to succeed; that without an injunction it will suffer irreparable harm — and more harm than the defendant; and that an injunction won’t disserve the public interest. Sparks’ ruling permits Planned Parenthood to better serve the public interest — for instance, by enabling the local Capital Region affiliate to proceed with plans to break ground next month on a family-planning/abortion facility in South Austin. “The public interest will certainly be served by allowing the Plaintiffs to continue receiving federal funds to provide … crucial services to women throughout Texas,” he wrote.

This article appears in August 8 • 2003.

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