A letter from an attorney representing Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi outlines steps the state took to void a decade-long partnership in which Planned Parenthood received grant funding through the state for HIV-related services, namely condom distribution and HIV testing in Memphis.
The letter was sent to Tennessee Department of Health’s general counsel about two months before Planned Parenthood and several nonprofits learned the state would no longer accept federal funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control for HIV-related services.
In the Nov. 16 letter obtained by The Commercial Appeal, attorney Alan Schoenfeld said the state’s attempts to disqualify Planned Parenthood from the HIV funding and terminate a long-standing memorandum of understanding between the healthcare organization and the state health department were both unlawful and in violation of Planned Parenthood’s constitutional rights.
The letter offers insight into the increasingly fraught relationship between the state and Planned Parenthood.
“Regrettably, however, the Planned Parenthood has been a consistent target of unlawful efforts to disqualify it from government programs, for reasons entirely unrelated to the programs at issue,” Schoenfeld wrote.
The Tennessee Department of Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter or the department’s relationship with Planned Parenthood on Friday afternoon.
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The letter referenced a similar action to strip Planned Parenthood from federal funding in two separate attempts in 2012 and 2017. The later attempt occurred in Shelby County when former County Commissioner Terry Roland brought a motion forward to strip a $115,000 county grant meant for condom distribution through Planned Parenthood.
The motion, at the time, was interpreted not as an indictment on condom distribution, but an indictment on abortion and Planned Parenthood. The motion failed in a 7-5 vote.
Tennessee plans to fund HIV programs through metro health departments
On Wednesday, community-based nonprofits, healthcare organizations and Planned Parenthood were formally notified of the state’s decision to stop accepting some federal funding for HIV-related programming.
The move was met with shock from organization leaders. The timing is mid-grant cycle, and it leaves small nonprofits, as well as Planned Parenthood, on the hook to come up with other funding strategies for HIV-related services. Most of the organizations provide direct service to lower-income Tennesseans.
While the federal Ryan White Part B program remains unaffected, TDH plans to discontinue accepting funds from two other pots of money to pay for HIV-related services at nonprofits. According to the TDH website, those grants helped fund: “HIV counseling, testing and referral, HIV partner counseling and referral services, HIV health education and risk reduction programs, HIV prevention for positive individuals, public information programs, a toll-free HIV/STD hotline, capacity building programs, and a quality assurance and evaluation component.”
The state will still fund HIV programs through the state’s six metro health departments, located in Shelby, Davidson, Knox, Madison, Hamilton and Sullivan counties.
“The funding for this HIV prevention program is very important and it’s important that it is spent effectively and efficiently in the ways that best serve Tennessee,” Gov. Bill Lee told reporters Friday. “We think we can do that better than the strings attached with the federal dollars that came our way and that’s why we made that decision.”
Though CDC funding to community-based organizations will officially cease on May 31, the state health department has already scrubbed Planned Parenthood from its website as a listed free condom distributor. According to the internet archiving service the Wayback Machine, Planned Parenthood had previously been listed by TDH as a condom distributor.
Tennessee and the South in general remain HIV transmission hotspots. Preliminary CDC data show 831 new cases of HIV were diagnosed across Tennessee in 2021 and 575 new cases were diagnosed in the first nine months of 2022.
According to the federal agency, Shelby County is part of the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. initiative because it is one of 50 local areas that account for more than half of all new HIV diagnoses across the country.
AHEAD, which solely tracks HIV-related data, includes a data subset for Shelby County. According to AHEAD, Shelby County saw 232 new HIV diagnoses in 2022.
The CDC has not returned a request for comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Micaela Watts is a reporter for The Commercial Appeal covering issues tied to access and equity. She can be reached at micaela.watts@commercialappeal.com.
Corinne S Kennedy covers healthcare, real estate and economic development for The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached via email at Corinne.Kennedy@CommercialAppeal.com
