(LifeSiteNews) – Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a federal lawsuit this week challenging a Biden administration rule aimed at making it more difficult for law enforcement to get its hands on medical data necessary to enforce state abortion bans, specifically targeting cooperation between investigators and health professionals across state lines.
As previously covered in April, the new rule from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) modifies the Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information under the federal Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic & Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, which governs when patient health data can and cannot be shared.
Claiming that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade’s “right” to abortion “increases the likelihood that an individual’s PHI (personal health information) may be disclosed in ways that cause harm to the interests that HIPAA seeks to protect,” the new rule “prohibits a regulated entity from using or disclosing an individual’s PHI for the purpose of conducting a criminal, civil, or administrative investigation into or imposing criminal, civil, or administrative liability” pertaining to so-called “reproductive healthcare” that is legal within the state or protected by federal law.
Critics warned that the rule change will make it vastly more difficult for state authorities to investigate abortionists who violate their pro-life laws, undermining the Supreme Court ruling that Democrats have vowed to circumvent through any means necessary – or, as the Biden administration has put it, a “whole-of-government” effort to maintain abortion “access.”
On Monday, ADF announced its lawsuit challenging the rule on the grounds that it exceeds the federal government’s lawful authority under HIPAA and limits the ability of both doctors and law enforcement to protect patients. They are representing Dr. Carmen Purl, a family physician who runs a walk-in clinic in Texas and wants to preserve her ability to report suspected abuse of both the mothers and the children who come to see her.
“Doctors and states should be able to protect patients from abuse,” ADF senior counsel Julie Marie Blake said. “The Biden-Harris administration’s unlawful rule weaponizes laws about privacy that have nothing to do with abortion or gender identity. The rule undermines state laws that protect mothers and unborn children from the harms of abortion, and vulnerable children from dangerous and sterilizing procedures like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and life-altering surgeries. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs resoundingly affirmed that states — not unelected bureaucrats — should set abortion policy and be free to protect unborn life.”
Pro-life laws have substantially reduced the number of surgical abortions in the two years since Roe was overturned, but the White House and the abortion lobby have been working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects through a variety of strategies. Among them are the distribution of abortion pills across state lines, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, placing abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.