Introduced by Rep. Alice Mann (DFL-Lakeville) and Sen. John Marty (DFL-Roseville), HF 1011 / SF 1293 would increase funding for the Family Planning Special Projects (FPSP) grant to protect family planning clinics and the thousands of Minnesotans who rely on them for care.
End of Session update (June 2019): Did not become law.
Both the Minnesota House of Representatives and Governor Tim Walz strongly supported increasing funding for the Family Planning Special Projects (FPSP) grant, with the Governor and the House both including additional funding in their health care budget proposals. Unfortunately, the GOP-controlled Senate did not support increasing funding for family planning, and instead focused on restricting abortion access and funding fake women’s health clinics. Due to strong GOP opposition to family planning funding, the final budget agreement did not include additional family planning funding.
There is significant unmet need for reproductive health care services across Minnesota.
- Forty percent of all pregnancies in Minnesota are unintended, indicating an ongoing and urgent need for accessible family planning and reproductive health services.
- Women in greater Minnesota have a 30% higher risk of being diagnosed with invasive disease—like cervical and breast cancer—compared with those in the Twin Cities area, and are less likely to receive preventive gynecological care, including breast exams, pap tests, and colorectal cancer screening.
- Each year, approximately 20 million American women are in need of publicly funded family planning services; only a fraction of women receive those services.
- In Minnesota, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) is now at historically high levels, with young people ages 15-24 heavily impacted.
Family planning clinics are on the front lines of delivering high-quality reproductive health care, especially to rural, low-income and uninsured Minnesotans.
If Planned Parenthood closed clinics, other public health centers would not be able to fill the gap of affordable health care that Planned Parenthood provides to people who are uninsured or low-income. PPMNS’ network of 17 clinics and 14 delegate clinics provide Minnesotans with a range of essential preventive health services including contraception, STD testing and treatment, HIV testing, and breast and cervical cancer screenings. For many, these clinics are their only source of health care.
The need for Planned Parenthood services is particularly acute in rural areas. Fifty-five percent of Planned Parenthood clinics in Minnesota are in rural or medically underserved areas, meaning that often without Planned Parenthood, patients would have nowhere else to turn for reproductive health care.
The Trump-Pence administration’s Title X gag rule will hurt Minnesota’s network of family planning clinics and block low-income Minnesotans from accessing essential reproductive health care services. As a result, 53,000 Minnesotans will be blocked from receiving affordable, expert health care at Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics.
Not only will increased funding help clinics withstand the federal family planning cuts, the increased funding will allow clinics to serve more patients, address the STD crisis, ensure access to birth control and improve the overall health of Minnesotans. To protect family planning clinics and the thousands of Minnesotans who rely on them for care, we need to increase funding for the Family Planning Special Projects (FPSP) grant.
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