The original ban, written into Section 71113 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, cut off federal Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers for one year. That year ran out on July 4, 2026, and clinics began billing Medicaid again within days. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) had tried to stop the lapse in April, filing an amendment to the Senate budget resolution to extend the prohibition. The Senate rejected it, 50 to 48, with Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) among those voting no. Estimates place the value of the restored funding at up to $600 million a year.
House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told reporters the defunding push, which he says he raised early in the reconciliation process, did not survive the need to "stay narrow" this time around. "We got to a point where the clock was just, was what it was," Arrington said. Hawley called the outcome indefensible: "There is no excuse, none, for Planned Parenthood to be receiving taxpayer money to be carrying out the mutilation of our children, to be carrying out the murder of the innocent unborn."
The fight has already run once through federal court. A district judge blocked the original ban in 22 states and the District of Columbia last December; the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed that injunction and let the cuts stand while the law remained in force. Even now, with the federal ban gone, some states are holding their own line — Indiana continues to withhold state Medicaid dollars from its Planned Parenthood affiliate, a dispute still working through that state's courts.
A Clock Is Not a Conscience
Arrington's word for what happened was "the clock." The clock ran out, he said — the way clocks do, impersonal, apologizing to no one. That is an honest description of how a calendar works. It is not, however, an honest description of what a nation owes the smallest and weakest of its people. What a Congress funds one year and forgets to re-fund the next was never, in God's accounting, a matter of scheduling. It was always a matter of who counts as a neighbor.
Scripture does not leave this to whoever controls the floor schedule. It puts the question to the individual man and woman, plainly, and it leaves no room for a procedural excuse.
"If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain;" (Proverbs 24:11)
The verse that follows answers the alibi before it is even offered — "Behold, we knew it not." Scripture answers that with the reminder that the One who weighs the heart is not fooled, and He renders to every man according to his works. No appropriations bill, no budget resolution, no procedural deadline is final before that court.
If your own hands are not clean in this — if you have paid taxes without a thought for where they went, or paid a clinic yourself, or urged someone else toward that door — the answer is not despair. It is the same answer Scripture has always given the guilty. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's own Son, was shed for sinners, and it cleanses whatever sin is brought honestly to Him. That includes this one.
Keep pressing elected men and women on this, by every lawful means available. That labor is not wasted, and Congress may yet take it up again before the year is out. But do not let a vote in Washington settle the matter in your own heart. The child in the womb was never a line item. He was a life God knew before he was formed, and the question of whether he lives or dies was decided long before any Senate roll call — decided by the character of the God who made him, and who is still, today, in the business of delivering those drawn toward death, one soul at a time.