DALLAS — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood is still a priority for him despite the lapse of a one-year ban against the abortion provider receiving Medicaid reimbursements.
“I would like to continue the defunding of Planned Parenthood on this, of course, and we’re looking for legislative vehicles to do that,” Johnson told the Washington Examiner during a Wednesday morning interview on Day 1 of Republicans’ midterm convention.
Planned Parenthood, which provides abortion services, regained access to federal funding after a one-year ban installed by Republicans in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act lapsed in July.
Johnson said that “the Hyde Amendment is applied to every piece of legislation that’s relevant. You cannot use a cent of taxpayer dollars to fund an abortion. We absolutely must make sure that’s true.”
The Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding for abortion except in the narrow circumstances of rape, incest, or life-threatening complications for the mother. Still, the lapse meant that Planned Parenthood can once again receive Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion care, such as contraception and screening for sexually transmitted diseases, enraging anti-abortion advocates.
Anti-abortion advocates have pressed Republicans to reinstitute the prohibition before the November elections.
Johnson did not preview a timeline for when the ban could be reinstated. When asked whether he had legislative vehicles in mind to pursue cutting off federal funding, the speaker confirmed he did, but that he wouldn’t preview which ones to the media.
“You cannot use a cent of taxpayer dollars to fund an abortion,” Johnson said. “We absolutely must make sure that’s true.”
Johnson said that there are many “angles to the law that we need to get to” regarding defunding Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, citing litigation involving the Justice Department and state regulations.
“Of course, we overturned Roe v. Wade with the [Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] decision, but tragically, shockingly, the number of abortions has gone up because of the mail-in abortion pill, which is a dangerous, terribly dangerous thing,” Johnson said. “It’s led to the deaths of lots of women who have done that without supervision of a physician.”
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Abortions have gone up slightly since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with roughly 1,126,000 abortions having been provided by clinics in 2025, a 21% increase from 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The speaker’s comments come amid a major abortion case that will determine the strength of the anti-abortion movement post-Roe, in which Louisiana is arguing before a federal appeals court that the Food and Drug Administration allowance of telehealth and mail delivery of mifepristone infringes on states’ rights to ban abortion. If the lawsuit is successful, online and mail access to the drug could be eliminated nationwide.