When Care Is Denied: Why We Stand With Planned Parenthood North Central States

There is a phrase we keep coming back to at CHF. Fighting the good fight, again. Few of our partners embody it more fully right now than Planned Parenthood North Central States.

The Care at Stake

PPNCS serves more than 93,000 patients a year across a five state region that includes Iowa, where our foundation has its deepest roots. The care it provides is the ordinary, essential kind that keeps people healthy. Birth control. Cancer screenings. Testing and treatment for infections. Wellness exams. For many patients, especially women, people of color, and families in rural communities, it is the only provider they trust and the only one within reach.

The Care Being Denied

That access is under direct attack. A federal budget provision now blocks patients from using Medicaid to pay for care at Planned Parenthood, and the courts have allowed that block to stand while the case moves forward. More than 30 percent of PPNCS patients had relied on Medicaid. Overnight, the people with the fewest options were told their coverage no longer counts at the place they have trusted for generations.

The consequences are not hypothetical. When Iowa pushed Planned Parenthood out of its family planning program, the state saw a sharp rise in sexually transmitted infections and a steep drop in the number of people served. The research is consistent on this point. No other provider can simply absorb the gap. When these doors close, care does not move somewhere else. It disappears.

Why We Stand With Them

PPNCS has not flinched. They have committed to seeing every patient they can, offering sliding scale fees and new pathways to care so that a person's income does not decide whether they get a cancer screening. That is courage under real pressure, and it is exactly the kind of resolve our Human Services pillar was built to back.

Reproductive access is health care. Denying it does not make the need go away. It only makes the need more dangerous to meet. CHF is proud to stand with Planned Parenthood North Central States, with the clinicians who keep showing up, and with every patient who deserves to walk through an open door.

Fighting the good fight, again.