The Biden administration is warning retail pharmacies against denying patients abortion-inducing medication, saying this would violate anti-discrimination laws by withholding healthcare from pregnant people.
The Department of Health and Human Services’s Office for Civil Rights has released guidelines reinforcing the Obamacare law that warns more than 60,000 U.S. pharmacies against refusing to dispense abortion-inducing medication, stipulating that doing so is pregnancy discrimination. That includes discrimination based on current pregnancy, past pregnancy, potential or intended pregnancy, and medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth.
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“HHS is committed to ensuring that everyone can access healthcare, free of discrimination,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said. “This includes access to prescription medication —including birth control, miscarriage management, and medication abortion from their pharmacy.”
HHS also asserted that pharmacists could not refuse to fill prescriptions for drugs that could facilitate an abortion but are also used to treat other conditions, such as methotrexate, which is also used for rheumatoid arthritis. Other instances include one in which a pharmacy refuses to dispense a prescription for hemoglobin to mitigate the risk of hemorrhaging if a pharmacist becomes aware that the patient will be undergoing a surgical abortion.
Notably missing from the agency’s reminder to retail pharmacies was a clarification under Obamacare for pharmacists who object to medication abortion on religious or moral grounds. CVS and Walgreens allow pharmacists who oppose medication abortion for these reasons to decline to prescribe the drugs as long as they can direct the patient to another means of getting the prescription, either by having another pharmacist fill it or referring the patient to a nearby location. The guidance does, however, protect pharmacists from being discriminated against by their employers for refusing to fill the prescriptions.
The federal guidance comes amid mounting pressure from abortion rights groups on the Biden administration to bolster protections for abortion-inducing drugs.
“Calls to ‘just vote’ are not enough. People need care now & that wait could mean life or death,” tweeted Sharmin Hossain, the campaign director of the Liberate Abortion Coalition, which comprises more than 150 reproductive rights organizations.
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Medication abortion is made up of a regimen of two medications taken 24 to 48 hours apart. The procedure accounted for 54% of all abortions in the nation, up from nearly 44% in 2019 and 39% in 2017, according to a survey from the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in support of abortion rights.
