HARRISBURG — The operators of 15 abortion clinics sued Pennsylvania on Wednesday in a bid to persuade state courts to reverse a decades-old decision upholding limits on the use of state Medicaid dollars to cover abortions.

The lawsuit, filed in Commonwealth Court, seeks an order requiring the state’s Medicaid program to begin covering abortions, without restriction, and contends that Pennsylvania’s 1982 law violates the constitutional equal protection rights of low-income women.

The abortion clinics cite the same state constitutional provisions as the lawsuit decided by the state Supreme Court in 1985. That court upheld the ban on the use of state dollars for abortion, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.

Sixteen states allow public dollars to cover abortions beyond those exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

“What’s different is the law’s evolved,” said Susan Frietsche, from the Women’s Law Project. “Other states have gone a different way that makes more sense and we have now got some empirical evidence that we didn’t have in 1985. People have studied what happens to low-income women who are deprived of access to abortion and it is devastating to their lives.”

The court’s 1985 ruling found that the state was not interfering with a woman’s right to an abortion.

Pennsylvania’s law is nearly identical to federal limits on the use of federal Medicaid dollars.