The Biden administration threatened to block Medicaid funds to pharmacies that refuse to stock abortion drugs or sell contraception that may cause abortions in a new guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The HHS Office for Civil Rights sent the warning to approximately 60,000 pharmacies across the U.S., according to a department press release. The new guidance is part of the Biden administration’s “response to protect reproductive health care,” meaning abortion, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24.
“We are committed to ensuring that everyone can access health care, free of discrimination,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “This includes access to prescription medications for reproductive health and other types of care.”
The department warned pharmacies that they could be punished for discriminating against pregnant women and banned from receiving reimbursements from Medicare/Medicaid if they refuse to fill prescriptions for contraception or drugs used to treat miscarriages (some of these also are used for or can cause abortions).
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“HHS is committed to ensuring that people can access reproductive health care, free from discrimination,” the department said, adding that the new guidance reminds pharmacies “of their obligations under federal civil rights laws.”
According to the guidance, pharmacies must provide all FDA-approved contraception, which includes emergency contraception and types that may cause early abortions, if the pharmacy provides any other type of contraception, including condoms.
A failure to do so may be “pregnancy discrimination” under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, the Biden administration warned.
The guidance also tells pharmacies that they must provide drugs used for abortions and prescribe them when the purpose is to treat a miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy or other medical condition.
Roger Severino, former Office of Civil Rights leader under the Trump administration, said this could just be a work-around to force pharmacies to stock abortion drugs, including in pro-life states that protect unborn babies from abortion.
“They’re trying to mandate the stocking of abortion-inducing drugs and the performance of abortions across the nation using tools that don’t grant the federal government that authority,” Severino told the New York Times. “They are trying to shoehorn abortion into laws that clearly weren’t designed to address abortion.”
Here’s more from the New York Times:
“They are trying to identify federal statutes that in some way will supersede state abortion restrictions and bans,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, an expert in public health law at Georgetown University. Of the guidance for pharmacists, he said, “The obvious goal is to have abortion medication in stock to treat a range of medical conditions and to be available for an abortion.”
Yet the new guidance is cautiously written, and steers clear of telling pharmacies that they have to provide the drugs for the purpose of medication abortion, which is banned or restricted in certain states. Nor does the guidance address how a provision in federal law called the Church Amendments would apply. That measure allows health care providers, including pharmacists, not to perform or assist in abortions if they have religious or moral objections.
The newspaper predicted that the Biden administration will face a lawsuit for its latest pro-abortion actions.
In recent months, Democrat leaders also have been quietly taking steps to get rid of federal conscience protections and force medical workers to abort unborn babies. Last year, the Biden administration dropped a lawsuit against a hospital accused of tricking a pro-life nurse into aborting an unborn baby.
Then in April, Christian medical leaders raised alarm a potential new pro-abortion mandate that could shut down Christian health care throughout the U.S. A few days later, HHS officials confirmed to Politico that they plan to revoke a Trump administration rule that protected pro-life medical workers from being forced to kill unborn babies in elective abortions.
Democrat leaders also are trying to re-frame religious freedom protections as oppression. A recent talking points memo from the U.S. Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus tells lawmakers to describe conscience protection laws, which protect doctors and nurses from being forced to abort unborn babies, as “refusal of care/denial of care laws.”
