Patients urge Maine to replace family planning funds stripped under Trump’s abortion gag rule

At a press conference Thursday morning in Augusta, a dozen legislators joined family planning providers and their patients to urge the state legislature to pass a bill, LD 1613, that would replace Title X program funds lost after the Trump administration enforced a national abortion “gag rule.”

Sonny Shouse, a transgender man and domestic abuse survivor, credited Planned Parenthood and Maine Family Planning (MFP), with saving his life.

“The reason I am still standing here, able to give my voice to this cause is because Planned Parenthood saved my life,” said Shouse. “I’ve experienced domestic violence, homelessness, and related trauma that is sadly a very common shared experience within my community”

While Shouse was rejected by his biological parents after telling them he was transgender, his aunt provided him with a safe space to live.

“There are many trans kids who don’t have someone like that, someone to give them support,” he said. “But most of all, they aren’t safe. Planned Parenthood offers them that safety.”

“When I told my provider at Planned Parenthood that I preferred a different pronoun than the one that stood on my legal documents, she immediately changed it in the system, and asked me if I had considered hormone therapy,” Shouse continued. “I couldn’t help but cry.”

Late last year, after the gag rule went into effect, MFP and Planned Parenthood withdrew from the Title X program that had provided the clinic networks with $2 million in federal funds.

The rule restricts Title X projects from performing, promoting, referring patients for, or supporting abortion as a method of family planning unless a patient explicitly states they want to have an abortion. Even then, patients can only be given a list of other health care providers who may, or may not, offer abortion services.

In a 2019 Portland Press Herald op-ed, MFP President George Hill characterized the gag rule as violating “medical ethics and standards of care,” and wrote that MFP’s continued participation in the program would create significant barriers for women — especially women living in rural Maine — seeking safe, accessible abortion care.

“This bill would fulfill the public health obligation that the state has for providing family planning services for low-income women, teens, and increasingly more transgender patients,” Hill told Beacon.

“Regardless of where you live, or what you earn, access to evidence-based reproductive health care and family planning is absolutely essential,” said Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon (D-Freeport), the bill’s sponsor, at the press conference. “For many of these patients, this is the only healthcare provider they are seeing.”

The media event was followed by a public hearing for LD1613 before the Health Coverage, Insurance and Financial Services Committee. A committee work session and vote on the bill will be held in the coming weeks, with votes likely to follow in the full House and Senate.



Top photo: House Speaker Gideon advocating for the legislature to support her bill on Thursday. | Cara DeRose