On November 6, Governor Jim Pillen signed an executive order revoking Planned Parenthood’s eligibility (and the eligibility of all abortion providers) to receive Medicaid funds in Nebraska.
This is very good news. Medicaid is a federal program, funded by taxpayers. Its purpose is to ensure that people of very low income are able to afford health care. The program has been abused for years by Planned Parenthood, which claims it is entitled to those funds for its “services” upon the poor (which in large part consist of abortion, sterilization, contraception, and transgender “sex-rejection” procedures).
It has long been a pro-life policy priority to kick Planned Parenthood and other birds of the same dirty feather off the taxpayers’ dime. The Governor’s executive order does just that for Nebraska. Its effect will be the drying up and discontinuation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds per year that had been going to the abortion industry in our state.
Why hadn’t this been done before? The short answer is that until recently the states that have tried to fully defund abortion in Medicaid have subsequently found themselves sued and swamped in years of litigation. South Carolina, to take one example, attempted to defund Planned Parenthood in 2018. That defunding was placed on hold indefinitely while a court battle played out for seven years.
But in June 2025 the U.S. Supreme Court finally weighed in, allowing South Carolina’s defunding of Planned Parenthood to stand (and finally take effect in October!). This ruling gave Nebraska's state government confidence it could successfully follow in South Carolina’s footsteps. Nebraska then proceeded, by executive order of the Governor, to disqualify Planned Parenthood from Medicaid on November 6.
Now, a word of caution I feel obliged to include for the Register’s readers: this executive order is not perfect. It includes some throwaway language assuring the public that the state recognizes the so-called necessity of the availability of “family planning.” This is nearly always a code word for contraception, which is not only destructive in its own right but is also the cultural fountainhead of abortion. (A society that depends on contraception—and contraception always, inevitably, eventually fails—such a society also depends on and demands the right to procure abortion.)
It is important to note that in this executive order, the “family planning” language has no legal effect. Its presence in an otherwise excellent document is nevertheless disappointing.
That defect aside, we are right to be happy and grateful about the ejection of Planned Parenthood from Medicaid in our state. Not only Planned Parenthood’s “abortion services,” but the whole organization and everything it does (including contraception, sterilization, and sex-rejecting interventions) will no longer be subsidized by our taxes in Nebraska. The industry will instead have to get that money from willing donors, if it can find them here, and that’s an important win.
It is also worth emphasizing that given the abortion industry’s hyper-focus on local profit margins to fuel its maniacal political campaigns, this loss of annual revenue makes the business and political environment for Planned Parenthood and company much less appealing in Nebraska starting today.
This is another milestone passed in our work to break down and tread underfoot the culture of death in Nebraska. Readers may be tired of seeing this in print, but it bears repeating that this work is a bigger challenge than most of us realize. The fortress we are dismantling has, on the most conservative telling of this story, 50 years of legal and cultural weight behind it. But together we are up to the task if we remain faithful, patient, smart, creative, determined, and united. Another important victory won! We press on.
