Press Release  AG Campbell Challenges Title X Funding Conditions On Family Planning Programs

Boston — Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell today co-led a coalition of 22 other states in suing to block a new federal policy that threatens critical federal funding for family planning programs unless states and providers comply with a variety of unlawful conditions.  

The lawsuit, filed today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, challenges new conditions on Title X funds, which support reproductive health care, family planning, cancer screenings, and other critical preventive care for millions of Americans nationwide. The new conditions force states and providers to choose between conforming their Title X programs to the administration’s ideological vision of family planning or placing their federal funding at risk.  

The states are asking the court to block the unlawful conditions and protect Americans’ access to affordable, high-quality health care. 

“Federal funding should never be used as a weapon to undermine access to essential services, such as comprehensive family planning and reproductive health care,” said AG Campbell. “I will always stand up for the Massachusetts residents who rely on Title X for affordable, high-quality health care services and challenge unlawful attempts to put politics ahead of people.” 

Title X is the only federal grant program dedicated specifically to family planning and related preventive health services. For more than 50 years, Title X has helped millions of low-income patients access contraception, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing and treatment, pregnancy testing and counseling, and other preventive health care.  

In July, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a new funding notice for the next five-year grant cycle that directs applicants to align their programs with a sweeping set of political priorities in order to receive or keep federal funds. Alignment with the priorities could result in eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, excluding and stigmatizing transgender people, discouraging the use of contraception in favor of natural family planning, counseling patients toward marriage and parenthood rather than providing neutral, patient-centered guidance, and complying with unrelated political priorities like “ending crime and disorder on America's streets.” Providers who don't comply risk losing their funding altogether.  

In Fiscal Year 2026, Massachusetts grantees received more than $6.5 million in Title X family planning service grants, including more than $5.5 million to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), which services more than 100,000 clients a year, and nearly $1 million to Action Boston for Community Development (ABCD), which services approximately 27,000 clients a year. DPH administers its Title X grant through its Sexual and Reproductive Health Program, which advances access to care in the Commonwealth by providing voluntary, confidential, high-quality services regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. The Program offers a comprehensive range of care that includes preconception health services and counseling, infertility services, pregnancy testing, contraceptive care, cancer and STI screenings, and more. In 2025, DPH facilitated more than 150,000 family planning visits to more than 100,000 individuals and conducted more than 133,000 STI and HIV tests.  

Research has documented that Title X-funded providers in the Commonwealth helped avert 16,200 unintended pregnancies and prevented the spread of 530 cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea in a single year. Without these critical screenings, contraceptive services, and early-stage interventions, public sector healthcare costs would have totaled more than $155 million. 

AG Campbell and the coalition argue that the new HHS conditions are arbitrary and capricious, and inconsistent with HHS’s regulations, which require providers to offer a broad range of contraceptive methods, provide nondirective counseling, and serve all patients, including LGBTQ+ individuals, in an inclusive manner. The states also argue that HHS unlawfully imposed the new conditions without the notice-and-comment process required under the Administrative Procedure Act. Additionally, the coalition argues that the conditions are so vague that providers cannot reasonably determine what compliance requires, in violation of the Constitution’s Spending Clause, which limits the government’s ability to attach unclear or unrelated strings to federal funding. 

The attorneys general are asking the court to declare the administration’s new political conditions unlawful, block HHS from enforcing them, and preserve access to Title X funding for state health agencies and other qualified providers under the program’s existing, longstanding rules. 

Joining AG Campbell in filing this lawsuit, which she co-led with New York Attorney General Letitia James and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, are the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Pennsylvania and Kentucky.  

###