WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Trump administration Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is rescinding a Biden-era guidance that attempted to force pharmacists to dispense abortion pills.
In 2022, the Biden HHS issued guidelines directing pharmacists that received federal funding to fill prescriptions for all legally prescribed drugs, even if they could be used to cause an abortion, on the grounds that refusal could constitute “discrimination” under the administration’s then-controlling interpretation of federal civil rights laws.
A 2023 update removed explicit mention of mifepristone and clarified that prescriptions did not have to be filled “for the purpose of abortion,” but was still written broadly enough that danger remained for pharmacists who refused to fill or stock drugs with both abortion and non-abortion purposes, such as methotrexate or misoprostol.
On January 27 of this year, HHS published a new notice announcing that the guidance has been rescinded, effective the same day, as part of the administration’s broader efforts “to end the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion,” as well as in recognition that it was “not based on the best reading of the underlying statutory authority or prohibition.”
The notice also notes that the old guidance uses “pregnant person,” which is inconsistent with the Trump administration’s executive orders reasserting biological truth over transgenderism. “E.O. 14168 defines a ‘woman’ or a ‘girl’ as ‘female’ based on biological facts and rejects efforts to ‘invalidate’ the biological category of ‘woman,’” it says. “Accordingly, the term ‘pregnant person’ is unnecessarily broad since only women and girls can be pregnant.”
The original pharmacy mandate was one of several steps former President Joe Biden’s administration took in its “whole-of-government” campaign to preserve abortion “access” after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, without regard for the conscience rights of Americans who had to be forced into participating. Restoring conscience rights has been one of the Trump administration’s domestic social priorities, from cutting taxpayer funding of abortion to investigating hospitals accused of forcing staff to participate in abortions.
As for abortion-inducing drugs, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the Supreme Court overturned Roe and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to the Lozier Institute’s Prof. Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”
Questions are currently swirling over when and how the Trump administration will handle the problem. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions primarily in the area of taxpayer funding, but concern has brewed among pro-lifers ever since he declared (amid a broader effort to moderate the Republican Party’s pro-life plank) that he would not enforce a federal law banning abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, continuing a Biden administration policy that undermines state pro-life laws.
Some pro-life leaders have called for the firing of U.S. Food & Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary over reports he is intentionally “slow walking” a promised review of the abortion pill safety data, which Makary denies.
