Texas challenges HHS guidance that pharmacies can’t turn away people who have a prescription for a drug that may end a pregnancy

Texas filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday difficult steerage issued by the Biden administration in July asserting that federal regulation doesn’t enable pharmacies to show away individuals who have a prescription for a drug which will finish a being pregnant.

The lawsuit was filed in a division of Texas’ Western District Courtroom, which just about ensures the case can be earlier than US District Choose David Counts, a Trump-appointed choose.

Texas argues that the coverage violates the Structure and federal regulation by utilizing federal well being packages to pressure pharmacies to hold abortion medicine in states the place abortion is banned.

“By requiring pharmacies that obtain Medicare and Medicaid funds – together with retail pharmacies operated by Texas Tech College Well being Sciences Middle – to dispense abortifacients when the lifetime of the mom just isn’t in peril, the Pharmacy Mandate flouts Dobbs’s holding that States could regulate abortion and immediately infringes on Texas’s sovereign and quasisovereign authority,” the lawsuit states.

The US Division of Well being and Human Providers – which issued the steerage and whose chief, Secretary Xavier Becerra, is the defendant in Texas’ lawsuit – didn’t instantly reply to CNN’s request for remark.

Texas has sued or threatened to sue over different makes an attempt by the Biden administration to mitigate the fallout from the Supreme Courtroom ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Well being Group that overturned the precedent that protected abortion rights nationwide.

Treatment abortion, a two-pill routine for ending a being pregnant, has turn into a very acute flashpoint within the post-Dobbs abortion panorama.