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Aug 24 (Reuters) – A federal judge in Texas late on Tuesday blocked President Joe Biden’s administration from implementing new guidelines in the Republican-led state that require hospitals to provide emergency abortions to women, despite state bans on the procedure.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix in Lubbock agreed with Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) guidance was unauthorized and went beyond the text of a related federal law.
The judge declined to halt implementation of the guidelines nationwide and instead only blocked HHS from enforcing it in Texas and against two anti-abortion physician groups.
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Hendrix’s ruling came ahead of an expected ruling Wednesday by another judge on whether a near-total ban in Idaho challenged by the U.S. Justice Department conflicts with the same federal statute at issue in the Texas case. Read more
Paxton, a staunch conservative, hailed the decision on Twitter, saying the Biden administration had sought to “transform every emergency room in the country into an abortion clinic.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Hendrix’s decision a “blow to Texans,” saying women in the state could now be denied vital care for conditions like severe bleeding or life-threatening hypertension.
“It’s wrong, it’s backward, and women can die as a result,” she said in a statement. “The war is not over”.
The guidance came after Biden, a Democrat, signed an executive order in July seeking to ease access to abortion services after the Supreme Court in June overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that recognized women’s nationwide right to abortion. Read more
Abortion services ceased in Texas after the state’s highest court on July 2, at Paxton’s urging, cleared the way for a nearly century-old abortion ban to go into effect. Read more
In his ruling, Hendrix, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump, said the guidance went too far in expanding the 1986 federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Work Act, which seeks to ensure that hospitals provide emergency medical care to the poor and uninsured.
“This Guidance goes beyond the text of EMTALA, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent on abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict,” he wrote.
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Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Rosalba O’Brien
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.