TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Aug 24, 2022

U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix this week agreed with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' guidance on emergency abortions was unauthorized and went beyond the text of a related federal law. The government had relied on a 1986 federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which seeks to ensure hospitals provide emergency medical care for the poor and uninsured, to impose the new guidelines. Reuters reports that Hendrix did not pursue a nationwide injunction, instead blocking HHS from enforcing the policy in Texas and against two specific groups of doctors. The administration’s policy would have required hospitals to provide emergency abortions to women regardless of state bans on the procedure.