Medicaid Coverage of Abortion in Massachusetts
Medicaid is a joint federal-state program, which uses funds from both levels of government to provide health care coverage for low-income individuals. However, the Hyde Amendment bans the use of federal Medicaid dollars to cover low-income women’s abortion care. This cutoff of federal Medicaid funding for abortions prompted some states to provide public funding for abortion services from their state coffers in an effort to ensure equal access to abortion care for low income women. To date, Massachusetts is one of only 17 states that uses its own funds in this manner. In 1981, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state’s Medicaid program must cover abortion, finding that restrictions on funding place an impermissible burden on low-income women. Courts in an additional 12 states have also required that state health care funds cover abortions. Another four states have provided funding for abortion coverage without a court mandate. Because each state establishes the contours of its own Medicaid program, some other states use their own funds to cover abortions under a wider range of circumstances than the cases of life endangerment and sexual assault allowed by the Hyde Amendment.
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