Reproductive health providers targeted by Trump ask for additional state funding

In order to protect Maine’s reproductive health care system, which has lost millions in federal funding over the last year, lawmakers are considering legislation to provide additional state support to protect against future changes.

The bill, LD 335, sponsored by Rep. Amy Kuhn (D-Falmouth), would provide an annual $5 million allocation. Maine Family Planning and Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, which have been fighting against the cuts in court, said they provide crucial health services across Maine but have been targeted because they also offer abortions. 

“In states where abortion remains legal, they are attacking our health care providers and attempting to shut their doors, including by cutting and withholding federal funding,” Kuhn told Maine Morning Star. “LD 335 is intended to respond to these attacks, protect Maine patients, and preserve their access to essential health care into the future.”

Kuhn and reproductive care providers are holding a press conference in Augusta on Wednesday ahead of a public hearing on the proposal.

Maine’s reproductive health care networks operate throughout rural areas and treat patients regardless of their ability to pay, often making them the only health care providers some patients see all year. The services they provide include cancer screenings, birth control and STI testing. No reproductive health provider can use federal funds for abortions, but Maine Family Planning and Planned Parenthood say their funding has been threatened by the Trump administration to provide what they described as a “backdoor abortion ban.”

One major contributor to the funding loss is a provision in Trump’s budget reconciliation law that passed last summer that banned certain nonprofit health care providers that offer abortions from receiving Medicaid reimbursements. Maine Family Planning and Planned Parenthood have asked the courts to restore the funds, but in the meantime have kept their commitment to continue serving Medicaid patients. Those slashed reimbursements made up between a quarter and half of their total funding, which they said has jeopardized their long-term viability. 

“Between over a decade of underfunding, increasingly unstable Title X funds and the lack of Medicaid reimbursements, we are in a very difficult financial situation,” said Olivia Pennington from Maine Family Planning, the state’s largest family planning health provider, which operates 18 clinics statewide. Title X is the country’s only federally funded program that supports family planning services.

Maine Family Planning estimated last summer that the loss of Medicaid reimbursements could amount to roughly $1.9 million a year. The provider had to close its primary care practice in three rural clinics last October due to that deficit. 

While the four Planned Parenthood health centers in Maine remain open, 22 others across the country have closed due to the impact of the reconciliation law. For Planned Parenthood’s Maine division, being unable to accept Medicaid reimbursements means a loss of $1 million.. Both organizations can’t exactly say how much they have lost, since Medicaid reimbursements vary based on the type of service provided. However, reproductive health providers were already facing rising health care costs and insufficient insurance reimbursements, Margulies said, which is why providers asked the state last year for $6 million in funding even before the federal cuts took effect.

“We’ve fought to remain open and continue to serve patients whether or not they’re insured, and that is a commitment that we are proud to keep,” said Lisa Margulies, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood’s Maine division. “At this moment, we’ve refused to pass the harm to our patients, but it’s not sustainable in the long term.”

The state has already tried to help alleviate the financial hit. Last session, the Legislature backed an annual allocation of $6 million for family planning services, and Gov. Janet Mills proposed an additional $2.25 million in one-time funding as part of her supplemental budget this year.

During her State of the State address to the Legislature, Mills said Trump and Republicans “have cruelly targeted reproductive health care providers in Maine by slashing funding for vital services that have nothing to do with abortion.”  

Title X funding

Both Margulies and Pennington said that even before the current Trump administration, Title X funding has been unreliable for the past decade, due to repeated policy changes. 

During Trump’s first term in office, his administration implemented the “domestic gag rule,” a set of provisions that prohibited clinics receiving Title X funds from providing counsel or referring patients for abortion. That rule led roughly a quarter of the 4,000 Title X-funded clinics nationwide to withdraw from the program, including Maine Family Planning and Planned Parenthood. The rule was rescinded under President Joe Biden, prompting Maine’s reproductive health providers to return to the program.

In April 2025, the Trump administration announced a funding freeze, with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services saying it would review dozens of providers for possible violations of federal law and executive orders.

As a result, Title X funding was withheld for a few months last year even though it had already been appropriated by Congress. When it was restored in August, Maine saw a 7% cut, meaning a reduction of $144,000. 

The volatility of the Title X program further illustrates why it’s important for the state to plan for future changes and have funding available for providers on an ongoing basis, Margulies said. 

“We remain quite concerned that there will be further attacks on this funding stream, either through an outright elimination of the Title X program, or that our participation in it will in some way be impacted,” Margulies said. “What they’re really attacking are the services people rely on that are not abortion, but all the range of preventative care that really keeps people in our state healthy.”