Over the past year in particular, federal judges appointed by former President Joe Biden have delivered a host of rulings and injunctions blocking President Donald Trump’s efforts. However, a trio of Biden judges is now bucking the trend and siding with the Trump administration — on abortion, of all issues.

The president’s signature legislature passed earlier this year, nicknamed the Big Beautiful Bill, included a provision barring taxpayer dollars, by way of Medicaid, from being used to fund abortions. Planned Parenthood and its affiliates were quick to challenge the measure, and Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, appointed by former President Barack Obama, issued an injunction blocking the provision from going into effect.

Talwani argued that the provision was punitive, intended to punish abortionists. On Friday, however, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit disagreed and vacated the lower court’s injunction. The majority’s opinion was penned by a Biden appointee, Judge Gustavo A. Gelpí, who was joined by Judges Lara Montecalvo and Seth Aframe, also Biden appointees. The Big Beautiful Bill’s provision, which effectively only impacts Planned Parenthood, “imposes no fine or other penalty for past conduct. Instead, it establishes new conditions on the receipt of appropriated funds in service of a new policy goal favored by Congress,” Gelpí observed. “And it does so by imposing conditions that Appellees can satisfy by halting abortion services. Thus, whatever else might be said … it simply does not impose ‘punishment’ as the term has been historically understood.”

“Second, we also disagree with the district court’s determination that [the Big Beautiful Bill] likely imposes punishment under the remaining factors for determining whether a measure is punishment for bill of attainder purposes,” Gelpí wrote. He noted that certain Republican members of Congress likely intended for the provision to result in “defunding” Planned Parenthood and that the provision “imposes a severe burden on Appellees’ ability to carry out all aspects of their mission,” but added that “these determinations do not compel the conclusion that [the Big Beautiful Bill] inflicts punishment.” The fact that the legislation “regulates only certain abortion providers does not mean that it punishes those that it does regulate. An act imposing future burdens on only some who are similarly situated does not impose punishment for bill of attainder purposes by virtue of being underinclusive.”

“Moreover … the calls by individual legislators to defund Appellees should not be mistaken for calls to punish. Unless linked to some prior act, a call to defund, even if it uses disparaging language about aspects of Appellees’ mission, is a call for a prospective change in action,” the appellate judge noted. “But prospective changes in action, even when burdensome, differ fundamentally from punishments, which are retrospective.” He continued, “At bottom, the preliminary injunction record does not cause us to doubt the sincerity of what the government tells us is the nonpunitive purpose behind [the Big Beautiful Bill]: halting federal Medicaid funding for abortion providers, presumably as a means of inducing them to stop performing abortions and/or diminishing their capacity for performing abortions.”

Ultimately, Gelpí concluded, the Big Beautiful Bill’s provision defunding Planned Parenthood “does not impose punishment on Appellees. It instead uses Congress’s taxing and spending power to put Appellees to a difficult choice: give up federal Medicaid funds and continue to provide abortion services or continue receiving such funds by abandoning the provision of abortion services.” Imposing a “difficult choice” on Planned Parenthood and its affiliates “does not demonstrate that Congress is punishing the recipient for past action.”

The circuit court also rejected the district court’s conclusion that the challenged provision is unconstitutional and violated Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment rights. Originally, Planned Parenthood had argued that because the Big Beautiful Bill defunds the abortion behemoth’s “affiliates,” the law infringes on the right to free association. Talwani interpreted the term “affiliate,” which is not clearly defined in the legislation, to apply to any organization partnering with Planned Parenthood. The circuit court, however, found that the law “favors a narrow construction of ‘affiliates’ based on corporate control,” rather than free association, and that, therefore, “as a matter of constitutional avoidance, that Appellees are not likely to succeed on the merits of their unconstitutional conditions claim.”

The Big Beautiful Bill’s abortion-defunding provision is slated to last one year, but Planned Parenthood still claimed that the measure could force it to close as many as 200 abortion facilities. According to its annual report for 2022 to 2023, roughly one third of Planned Parenthood’s revenue comes from state and federal taxpayer funds, including via Medicaid, despite the 1976 Hyde Amendment outlawing most federal funds from being used for abortions.