Texas is suing the Biden administration for using pharmacies to sidestep pro-life laws in red states and further its abortion-for-all agenda.
The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday, seeks to combat the Biden administration’s “war against Dobbs v. Jackson” by blocking the Department of Health and Human Services from forcing drug vendors such as Walgreens and CVS to fill fatal abortion pills — especially in states where those pills are illegal.
“The Biden Administration knows that it has no legal authority to institute this radical abortion agenda, so now it’s trying to intimidate every pharmacy in America by threatening to withhold federal funds,” Paxton said in a statement. “It’s not going to work. Texas and several other states across the country have dutifully passed laws to protect the unborn, and we are not going to back down just because unelected bureaucrats in Washington want to create illegal, extremist federal policies.”
Mere weeks after the Supreme Court released its Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services debuted guidance to the “roughly 60,000 U.S. retail pharmacies,” claiming that refusal to fill prescriptions like abortion pills would violate federal civil rights laws. Pharmacies that failed to comply with the Biden administration’s attempt to execute its abortion-on-demand agenda, HHS warned, could lose their federal funding.
This year, the Food and Drug Administration, at the behest of the White House, also worked to match the Biden administration’s post-Roe activism by quietly scaling back its regulation of the abortion pill, which includes myriad safety concerns.
Abortion pills such as mifepristone, which are responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions, are known to cause a 500 percent increase in abortion-related emergency room visits. One longitudinal study revealed that, in at least 17 states with taxpayer-funded abortion, many of which have relaxed chemical abortion laws, emergency room visits within 30 days following chemical abortions grew to nearly 34 percent of all ER visits as of 2015. The same study concluded that “chemical abortion is consistently and progressively associated with more postabortion ER visit morbidity than surgical abortion,” and the risks have been increasing year after year.
Now that the FDA and HHS have opened the door for CVS, Walgreens, and others to dispense the dangerous drug, those numbers are only expected to rise.
During his recent State of the Union address, President Joe Biden smeared states like Texas for “enforcing extreme abortion bans” and promised to do “everything we can to protect access to reproductive health care and safeguard patient privacy.”
Texas, however, says the Biden administration’s attempt to do dirty work through federal agencies not only “usurps pharmacies’ duty to comply with Texas law” but “is both procedurally and substantively illegal.”
“Whether the Biden Administration likes it or not, the question of abortion is up to the
people’s elected representatives—not unelected bureaucrats,” the lawsuit states.
Paxton’s office noted in a press release that federal anti-discrimination laws have never been used to force companies to participate in the process of ending an unborn child’s life.
“Rather, these protections have cut in the opposite direction by prohibiting any person or entity from being compelled to aid in the provision of abortions,” the release states.
Paxton was also one of the 20 state attorneys general to sign a letter on Feb. 1 warning CVS and Walgreens against cooperating with the Biden administration’s “bizarre interpretation” of a federal law that actually prohibits the mailing of abortion drugs.
“We emphasize that it is our responsibility as State Attorneys General to uphold the law and protect the health, safety, and well-being of women and unborn children in our states,” they wrote in the letter reminding companies the mailed medication is illegal. “Part of that responsibility includes ensuring that companies like yours are fully informed of the law so that harm does not come to our citizens.”
