Several medical groups are siding with the state of Tennessee, which is fighting the Biden-Harris administration against its move to yank federal funds from Tennessee just because it protects babies from abortions.
June 24 marked the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, and while the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a monumental victory for life, it was not the end of the fight.
In some ways, it was just the beginning.
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To date, 25 states have honored the will of their residents and passed laws to protect the lives of unborn babies. The state of Tennessee, for example, passed a Heartbeat Bill that prohibits abortions after six weeks of gestation.
In keeping with that law, it also requires that health care providers do not refer clients for procedures that are illegal in the state (i.e., abortion). That’s a perfectly reasonable, moral, and coherent exercise of Tennessee’s governmental authority. Yet, the Biden administration isn’t taking these pro-life laws sitting down. Tennessee’s leadership in the pro-life movement has made it a target for retaliation.
Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would cancel Tennessee’s Title X funding, which has supported Tennessee families for more than five decades. The reason? Because Tennessee is proudly a pro-life state.
Title X funding is strictly prohibited from being used to support abortion. Undeterred by that commonsense requirement, Biden’s HHS used an outdated, pre-Dobbs rule that requires Title X providers to offer abortion referrals, even though the law prohibits Title X funds from supporting abortions.
In one fell swoop, the Biden administration ignored the law and the latitude of states to protect life post-Dobbs.
The state is fighting back and today several medical groups sided with it.
Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Chris Schandevel filed a friend-of-the-court brief ADF attorneys filed on behalf of several pro-life and religious medical associations Wednesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The case State of Tennessee v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services involves a Biden-Harris administration rule that requires recipients of Title X funds to counsel and refer for abortions.
He told LifeNews:
“The rights of conscience are at the core of our constitutional freedoms, and forcing medical professionals to violate their beliefs and their Hippocratic oath to do no harm violates our most foundational freedoms. The Biden-Harris administration’s Title X rule forces doctors to refer for abortions to receive federal funding and ignores the reality that referring for an abortion is antithetical to the healing profession. The rule disregards rights of conscience and unlawfully forces many healthcare professionals to choose between violating their beliefs and forgoing generally available public benefits, potentially removing critical medical care for those in need. Indeed, the administration stripped Tennessee of all of its Title X funding because the state decided not to require referrals for abortions that are illegal in Tennessee. We urge the court to grant en banc review to require the Biden-Harris administration to restore Tennessee’s funding.”
