State Senate approves $7.45 million for family planning clinics

The Senate passed legislation to restore the $7.5 million in funding for family planning services that was cut by former Republican Gov. Chris Christie in 2010, and expand Medicaid coverage for those services on Thursday.

“This day has been eight years in the making and today we are finally going to pass legislation that we can reasonably expect will be signed,” Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D–Teaneck, said on the Senate floor before it voted 29-9 to appropriate the funds.

Gov. Phil Murphy pledged during his campaign, after an endorsement by Planned Parenthood, to restore the funding that had been slashed by Christie.

The bill, S-120, proposes to move $7,453,000 from the general fund in the fiscal year 2018 budget to the state Department of Health for family planning services grants. Since those funds had been cut, clinics that provide family planning services, such as Planned Parenthood, have closed throughout the state, according to the bill.

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Christine Sadovy, the legislative and political director for Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey, said at an Assembly health committee hearing on Monday, that six Planned Parenthood clinics alone had to close down over the last eight years. The Assembly health committee cleared the bill at that meeting and referred it to the Assembly budget committee.

Sadovy said the loss in that appropriation during Christie’s two terms contributed to an uptick in cases of sexually transmitted diseases because there was a lack in funding for screenings.

The funds are used to provide information and counseling on reproductive choices, as well as physicals, cancer screenings and other services, and can't be used, according to the bill, for abortion procedures.

Despite the loss in those grants over the last eight years, the Department of Health still funded $2.1 million to family planning clinics, said DOH communications director Donna Leusner.

Leusner said the DOH spent $13 million for cancer screenings and prevention programs at hospitals and local health departments. Another $5.7 million funded STD testing and prevention at hospital clinics, local health departments and nonprofits such as South Jersey AIDS Alliance, she said.

“We’re going to begin to reverse the tide that we have seen during the previous eight years and work to improve access to family planning services for women,” Weinberg said.

Weinberg also sponsored a corresponding bill, S-105, which was passed 34-5. Medicaid coverage would be expanded under the bill to cover people seeking family planning services who aren’t pregnant and have an income up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level – the same threshold currently used for pregnant women with Medicaid coverage.

Expanding the coverage, Weinberg said, would increase the federal funding the state receives.

“We will be able, for that additional population, to produce $9 in federal funding for every $1 that we spend in New Jersey,” she said. “Nine dollars for each person that has been left on the table for the last eight years.”

Email: carrera@northjersey.com