LOUISVILLE — Planned Parenthood’s leadership has “no plans” to close its two Kentucky locations following a judge’s ruling that the government can block Medicaid funding to the organization for a year.
Rebecca Gibron, the CEO of Planned Parenthood’s largest geographic affiliate of health centers that includes Kentucky, told the Lantern Thursday during a sit-down interview in Louisville that the state’s two locations — in Lexington and Louisville — will keep their doors open for now.
The two centers, which see thousands of Kentuckians every year, will continue offering routine services like mammograms, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted disease testing, prenatal and postpartum care and more.
Congress passed a sweeping budget law over the summer that, among other things, banned Medicaid payments to clinics and providers that offer abortions even for other health care, such as cancer screenings, and family planning services they provide. A judge blocked the ban briefly, but a U.S. Court of Appeals overruled that decision on Sept. 11.
Planned Parenthood leadership, Gibron said, has been preparing for such news since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, removing the constitutional right to abortion and handing states power to create a patchwork of laws. Kentucky immediately banned abortion in most cases. Since then, all lawsuits and bills filed in challenge of the law have failed.
“What we have been doing, frankly, ever since the fall of Roe, is contingency planning around these scenarios,” Gibron said while visiting the Louisville Health Center last week. “We anticipated a lot of what is happening.”
For now, she said, Kentucky Medicaid patients will continue to be served for free through September. Slightly more than half (51%) of Kentucky’s Planned Parenthood patients fall below the poverty line and 36% have Medicaid, according to the organization.
“Our No. 1 priority is protecting our patients’ access to care, so we are doing everything that we can right now to identify the path forward of how we do that,” Gibron said.
She is turning to donors, hoping to raise funds to fill the gaps, she said. Patients “may have to pay something in the future; that is yet to be determined what that may be,” she said.
Meanwhile, she believes that “there is no way” the funding blocks will last only one year.
“Absolutely, we are going to have to raise more money to mitigate that impact of the Medicaid defund,” Gibron said. “We are resilient and resolved. I am fiercely committed to our work and to our patients.”
‘Lives are at stake.’
Jennifer Allen, the CEO of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates and a policy expert with the organization, told the Kentucky Lantern that funding cuts will have far-reaching fallout, worsening maternal health, birth outcomes, maternity care deserts and more in a state already plagued by barriers to care and poor outcomes.
“Medicaid was created because we had a shared belief in this country that everybody should have coverage for some basic level of health care, including reproductive health care, and we seem to have lost that,” Allen said. “We know that Medicaid never guaranteed access. It only guaranteed at least a minimal level of coverage for folks who could least afford any access to health care.”
About 1 in 3 Kentuckians are covered by Medicaid, a federal-state program that also saw cuts in the budget bill passed by Congress this year.
People who have Medicaid coverage, Allen said, “are the folks who already have the worst health outcomes; already may be the sickest, and that’s just going to get worse.”
The Kentucky General Assembly, she said, needs to “find a way to assure that patients will still have access to care without cost for the lowest income.”
“We’ve got to figure out how to assure that we have a basic level of expectation of health as a part of basic human rights, as a part of human decency,” Allen said. “Being able to take care of yourself and your family, take care of your body, should be a basic value for all of us. That’s what we need to see. So, donors are wonderful. We love them. We’re so grateful to them, and they care, like we do, about making sure that patients can come in still and get access to care. But it shouldn’t have to be that way.”
During the interim between legislative sessions, Kentucky lawmakers have heard several presentations about federal changes to the Medicaid program and details about the budget bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. During the 2026 legislative session lawmakers will be tasked with passing a new two-year state budget, which would need to account for funding shifts set in motion by that law.
Rachel Brown, the area services director for Planned Parenthood who works in Kentucky and other states, said she’s already looking for ways to cut costs and streamline care. Kentucky’s centers see 4,861 patients every year in more than 8,000 visits, according to Planned Parenthood data.
“We don’t know what patients will do when they lose the ability to use their Medicaid here,” Brown said. “I think that patients will still want to come here if they can. The other thing is: There aren’t places to go. The idea that: ‘Take away people’s ability to come to Planned Parenthood and they’ll just go somewhere else’ is a farce. That is not a real thing.”
Kentucky has had a well-documented health care workforce shortage for years. Researchers have estimated Kentucky could lose 35 hospitals in the funding fallout from the federal budget bill.
For now: “I want to say really definitively: We have no plans to close our Louisville or Lexington health centers,” Gibron said. “Can I sit here and tell you that will be the case for the next three years of the Trump administration? I honestly don’t know yet, but I’m going to do everything I can to prevent it, because patients’ lives are at stake, and my plan is to not abandon our patients in the way that lawmakers have.”
This article was originally published by the Kentucky Lantern.
