Restoration of Funding for Clinics Is Blocked : Family planning: A $24-million budget cut in health care for poor women is temporarily upheld.

A state appeals court has temporarily blocked a judge’s order for Gov. George Deukmejian to restore the $24 million he slashed from family planning clinics that provide health care to poor women throughout the state.

The original order to restore full funding to the $36-million family planning program was scheduled to take effect Tuesday. But late that afternoon, the state filed an emergency request with the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Ventura to temporarily stay the order.

The state argued that it should not be forced to temporarily restore funding to the clinics while the case, filed earlier this month, was under appeal, said G.R. Overton, a deputy attorney general.

The stay “puts matters on hold” while the court of appeal “takes a closer look” at the state’s request, said Joel Diringer, an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance, one of two public interest law firms that filed suit against the state last November in San Luis Obispo. Diringer said he is confident that after the court “has fully reviewed the drastic impact of the cuts on the health of California women,” it will require the state to restore the clinics’ funding.

The two public interest law firms representing the plaintiffs--two patients, a doctor and a clinic--have until Jan. 5 to contest the state’s request, Diringer said. The court of appeal will then issue a ruling on whether the state should be forced to immediately restore funding to the clinics. After that issue is decided, the court must consider the state’s appeal of the original order, which ruled that the governor’s budget cuts were illegal.

Closures, Service Cuts

More than 40 family planning clinics in the state, 17 of them in Los Angeles County, have already closed because of the funding cuts. Hundreds of other clinics have curtailed or eliminated a wide array of services, including birth control services, Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, breast exams and tests for sexually transmitted diseases and the AIDS virus.

During the next two weeks, more than 7,000 poor women will not be able to receive treatment because of the funding cuts. This will result in about 2,000 additional unwanted pregnancies, which eventually will be a tremendous burden on California taxpayers, Diringer said.

In an unusual turn of events, one of two defendants in the case filed a document Tuesday with the appeals court stating that he agreed with the plaintiffs in the case. State Controller Gray Davis--a defendant in the suit along with Kenneth Kizer, director of the state Department of Health Services--believes that the governor’s funding cuts are illegal, said Jay Ziegler, a spokesman for Davis.

“In addition to the legal issues, all the evidence we’ve seen indicates that this approach to controlling the state’s expenditures will backfire in the long run,” Ziegler said. “The eventual costs of the cuts will greatly outweigh the short-term savings.”

Davis was automatically named in the suit because he is the state’s chief fiscal officer, Ziegler said.

Earlier this month, San Luis Obispo County Superior Court Judge William Fredman ruled that Deukmejian’s two-thirds cut in the family planning program was illegal because the law requires the state to provide family planning services to all low-income women who want them. He ordered the state to restore within 10 days full funding to family planning clinics throughout California.

He stayed the order for 10 days to give the Deukmejian Administration time to appeal.

During an Assembly subcommittee hearing in Los Angeles last week, several AIDS researchers predicted that there would be a huge jump in the number of AIDS cases statewide unless the funding was restored.

Deukmejian cut $24 million from about 500 family clinics in a budget veto last July. Bob Gore, press secretary for Deukmejian, said Wednesday that the cuts were legal because the state Constitution gives the governor authority to cut “discretionary programs.” The governor slashed the family planning budget “for purely fiscal reasons,” Gore said.

But the suit filed against the state cited a study by researchers at UC San Francisco who concluded that 56,000 additional pregnancies would result from this year’s family planning reductions, forcing the state to spend $190 million for Medi-Cal, welfare and other social services.