Nevada taxpayers will officially be funding all abortions via Medicaid, now that a judge has struck down restrictions, claiming those restrictions violated equal rights protections.
Earlier this year, Clark County District Judge Erika Ballou issued a ruling mandating the state Department of Health and Human Services to provide Medicaid coverage for all abortions. Previously, abortion could only receive taxpayer funding if it was deemed ‘life-threatening’ to the mother, or if the woman was pregnant from rape or incest.
Ballou said the taxpayer funding should begin no later than November, and the state has announced it won’t launch an appeal to her ruling, making it official. “Nevadans who have Medicaid as their health insurance will no longer need to fear that they will be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will,” Rebecca Chan, a lawyer with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said.
The ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project sued in 2022 after voters approved an Equal Rights Amendment to Nevada’s Constitution, guaranteeing equality under the law regardless of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry or national origin.
The ACLU argued that Medicaid abortion coverage restrictions violated the amendment’s ban on sex-based discrimination. Ballou had originally said she expected the state to appeal her ruling, but with the state’s refusal to appeal, taxpayers will now pay for all Medicaid abortions within just weeks.
Taxpayer-funded abortion has been shown to increase the number of abortions in a state.
A 2017 survey from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, formerly the research arm for Planned Parenthood, found that women who have taxpayer-funded abortions also tend to have more abortions. Additionally, another report, this time published by the pro-abortion Reproductive Health Investors Alliance, showed that the percentage of abortions paid for by taxpayers in states that do not cover abortions via Medicaid was just 1.5%. In states that use Medicaid to cover abortions, that percentage rose to 52.2%.
So with Ballou’s ruling taking effect, taxpayers will be paying for more women in Nevada to be getting abortions – whether they like it or not.
