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842,000 People Lost Access to Birth Control and Cancer Screenings When Title X Was Frozen in 23 States

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842,000 Patients, 879 Clinics

In 2025, the Trump administration withheld 22 Title X grants that funded family planning services in 23 states. 879 clinics lost funding, cutting off an estimated 842,000 patients from birth control, STI testing, cancer screenings, and other preventive care.

842,000 patients lost access to birth control and cancer screenings. 879 clinics in 23 states affected.

Title X is the only federal program dedicated to family planning. It serves 2.8 million patients annually, the majority of whom are low-income, uninsured, or underinsured. The services it funds are basic preventive care that most Americans take for granted.

The ACLU sued. In December 2025, HHS restored the funding. But in March 2026, new challenges emerged. HHS issued guidance on March 13 and gave grantees until March 20 to respond. One week to restructure programs that serve hundreds of thousands of people.

What Title X Pays For

Title X clinics provide contraception, pregnancy testing, STI screening and treatment, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and referrals. These are not elective services. An undetected cervical cancer, an untreated STI, an unplanned pregnancy in a state with an abortion ban — each of these has consequences that compound.

The program costs the federal government about $286 million per year. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that every dollar spent on publicly funded family planning saves $7.09 in costs that would otherwise fall on Medicaid and other public programs. Defunding Title X does not save money. It shifts costs and multiplies harm.

19 Million Women in Contraceptive Deserts

19 million women of reproductive age live in contraceptive deserts — areas with no full-range birth control access. Title X clinics are the primary provider of contraceptive services in many of these areas.

Idaho, which lost 35% of its OB-GYNs after its abortion ban, chose to forfeit its Title X funding entirely rather than accept the federal program’s requirements. The state’s decision removed another layer of reproductive healthcare from a population that had already lost a third of its specialists.

50 Planned Parenthood clinics have closed since 2025. Congress defunded Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood across 39 states in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Title X was the last remaining federal pipeline to these clinics for millions of patients.

Read more on the Reproductive Rights hub and the Idaho OB-GYN exodus brief.