A federal district court ruled Wednesday that doctors around the country are free to protect their patients by reporting suspected abuse, and to safeguard the health and safety of mothers and children. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed suit on behalf of a Texas physician in October to challenge rule changes by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In December, the court granted the doctor an injunction against Biden-era regulations that illegally restricted how doctors can protect patients from the harms of abortion and “gender transition” while her lawsuit proceeded. Now, the court has issued a permanent ruling eliminating the unlawful rule.
“As the court rightly found, doctors and states should be able to protect patients from abuse,” said ADF’s director of regulatory practice Matt Bowman. “This unlawful rule change would have weaponized laws about privacy that have nothing to do with abortion or gender identity. The Biden administration attempted to undermine state laws that protect mothers and unborn children from the harms of abortion, and vulnerable children from dangerous and sterilizing procedures like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and life-altering surgeries.”
The Biden-era changes to regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act added unprecedented restrictions on doctors’ ability to report abuse and states’ ability to protect children from abortion and harmful drugs and surgeries related to gender confusion. Without authority from the HIPAA statute, the new rule redefined “person” and “public health” to exclude unborn children, and it limited how doctors and law enforcement protect patients from abuse when it involves abortion.
“HIPAA confers authority to promulgate regulations protecting individually identifiable health information. But it confers no authority to distinguish between types of health information to accomplish political ends like protecting access to abortion and gender-transition procedures,” the court wrote in its opinion in Purl v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Thus, HHS lacks the authority to issue regulations that enact heightened protections for information about politically favored procedures.”
In the lawsuit, Carmen Purl, M.D., a family physician and owner of Dr. Purl’s Fast Care Walk In Clinic in Dumas, Texas, wants to be able to protect her patients by reporting suspected abuse, and to safeguard the health and safety of mothers and children.
