Judge blocks Texas from cutting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood

The judge said officials failed to provide any evidence of wrongdoing

A sign is pictured at the entrance to a Planned Parenthood building in New York. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

A federal judge has ruled that Texas cannot cut off Medicaid dollars to Planned Parenthood over edited videos filmed by anti-abortion activists in 2015.

US District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday preserving cancer screenings, birth control access, and more health services for roughly 11,000 low-income women at 30 clinics across the state, the Associated Press reports.

With the decision, Texas becomes the sixth state where federal judges have helped Planned Parenthood remain eligible for Medicaid. Similar efforts have also been blocked in Arkansas, Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

The state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, promised on Tuesday that his office would appeal the ruling, admitting that the decision was “disappointing and flies in the face of basic human decency," according to Reuters.

In December of last year, Texas officials announced that Planned Parenthood would no longer receive funding from its Medicaid program after anti-abortion activists accused the organisation of aborted fetuses.

Texas officials investigated Planned Parenthood over the videos but a grand jury cleared them of any wrongdoing January of last year. The same jury chose to instead indict the activists for fraud, accusing them of doctoring the videos. Still, state officials repeated the claims that the medical service provider may have violated the law and moved to cut its Medicaid funding.

Judge Sparks said that Texas failed to provide evidence of any wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

"A secretly recorded video, fake names, a grand jury indictment, congressional investigations — these are the building blocks of a best-selling novel rather than a case concerning the interplay of federal and state authority through the Medicaid program," he wrote in the decision. "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 healthcare providers from a social health care program for families and individuals with limited resources."