Federal Court Dismisses Pro-Abortion Groups’ Attempts To Compete With Pregnancy Centers For Federal Funding

A federal court shot down a lawsuit from pro-abortion groups alleging that new grant eligibility guidelines would exclude them from competing for public funds.

A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit Thursday against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) filed by the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA) and the Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania (FHCCP). The lawsuit alleged that the federal agency’s new grant requirements put their clinics at a competitive disadvantage.

The plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its Pennsylvania chapter, filed the lawsuit June 18, 2026, after HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, in April, announced a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) which bars grant recipients utilizing abortion as family planning from receiving Title X funds starting in fiscal year 2027.

“We are deeply disappointed that the court refused to review this case on the merits and protect the Title X program from the Trump administration’s attempt to undermine it,” Meagan Burrows, senior staff attorney for the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, stated in a press release published Friday afternoon. “Today’s decision is legally wrong and risks harming the millions of patients across the country who depend on the Title X program for access to vital family planning services. We will continue doing everything in our power to protect people’s ability to get the care they need to exercise their reproductive freedom, including from Title X providers.”

Along with committing to ending diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and practices, the NOFO stated that “‘[n]one of the funds appropriated under this title shall be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.’ We expect recipients to demonstrate how their Title X projects maintain strict separation from prohibited activities and contribute to broader HHS efforts to safeguard life-affirming, lawful, and ethical program delivery.”

The plaintiffs, however, alleged in the June complaint that “[t]he NOFO subverts the integrity of the Title X grant application process and, in so doing, enables Defendants to hijack the Title X program in order to give federal grants to entities that further Defendants’ political agenda instead of fulfilling Congress’s mandate to ‘offer a broad range of acceptable and effective family planning methods and services’ to patients on a voluntary basis.”

Judge Jennifer Wilson, who was nominated for the judiciary by President Donald Trump in 2019, dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims as moot and granted the defendants’ July 31 motion to dismiss without prejudice. As a result, while the court case is ended temporarily, the plaintiff or prosecutor may later refile the same claim or charges, respectively.

“[The] Plaintiffs allege that the NOFO ‘stacks the deck’ against otherwise qualified applicants. That is not a real and immediate harm; it is an inherent feature of competitive grant programs,” Wilson wrote in the court order. “In any grant competition, the criteria for selecting awardees are going to favor some applicants and disfavor others. That is the point of a competitive process—to identify the applicants best suited for the grant.”

Wilson further stated that the plaintiffs are not placed at a “competitive disadvantage” because “[t]he NOFO is a generally applicable set of criteria that the agency will use to award points to applications.”

“An ambiguous set of scoring criteria, applicable to all applicants, does not impact competition differently than a clear set of criteria dictated by the court,” Wilson wrote.

Neither the ACLU, NFPRHA, nor FHCCP responded to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.