Texas leaders keep fighting back against the Biden administration’s attempts to expand the killing of unborn babies in abortions.
On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit challenging a new Biden administration mandate that he said requires pharmacies to fill abortion drug prescriptions even in states where killing unborn babies is illegal, WFAA News 8 reports.
Paxton accused the Democrat leader of using the mandate to try to get around pro-life laws in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned.
“The Biden Administration knows it has no legal authority to institute this radical abortion agenda, so it is trying to intimidate every pharmacy in America by threatening to withhold federal funds,” Paxton said in a statement. “Texas and several other states across the country have 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.”
The mandate came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last July in direct response to the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. In the mandate, HHS said pharmacies cannot refuse to prescribe abortion drugs due to federal anti-discrimination law, and threatened to strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from pharmacies that do.
Paxton said the Biden administration’s interpretation of the law is “patently false,” according to The Epoch Times. He said the anti-discrimination law actually does the opposite: It protects individuals and entities like pharmacies from being forced to provide abortions.
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In the lawsuit, the attorney general asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to overturn the mandate.
“… 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. “The Biden Administration’s attempt to inject itself into that question is both procedurally and substantively illegal.”
Last week, a coalition of 20 state attorneys general also sent letters to the pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens, warning them not to sell abortion drugs.
Paxton’s is just the latest in a series of lawsuits that the Biden administration is facing for its pro-abortion actions. Late last year, a group of doctors and medical associations also sued the Biden administration for its decision to end safety regulations for the abortion drugs.
First approved under the Clinton administration, the abortion drug mifepristone is used to abort unborn babies up to about 10 weeks of pregnancy – although some abortionists use it later. It works by blocking the hormone progesterone and basically starving the unborn baby to death. Typically, abortion groups also prescribe a second drug, misoprostol, to induce labor and expel the baby’s body.
Along with millions of unborn babies’ deaths, the FDA has linked mifepristone to at least 28 women’s deaths and 4,000 serious complications. However, under President Barack Obama, the FDA stopped requiring that non-fatal complications from mifepristone be reported. So the numbers almost certainly are much higher.
Despite the physical risks and the increased likelihood of coercion and abuse, the Biden administration recently began allowing abortion drugs to be sold through the mail without a check-up or in-person contact with the pregnant mother.
In England, which began allowing mail-order abortion drugs around the same time, new investigations show a huge increase in ambulance calls and reports of coercion and abuse. There also have been reports of late-term babies being born alive at home as a result of mail-order abortion drugs because their mothers did not realize how far along they were.
Studies indicate the risks of the abortion drug are more common than what abortion activists often claim, with as many as one in 17 women requiring hospital treatment. A recent study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that the rate of abortion-related emergency room visits by women taking the abortion drug increased more than 500 percent between 2002 and 2015.
Another new study from the University of Toronto, “Short-Term Adverse Outcomes After Mifepristone–Misoprostol Versus Procedural Induced Abortion,” published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that one in ten women who took the abortion pill had to go to the emergency room, according to Pregnancy Help News.
