Last year, the Trump administration finalized its Title X “gag rule,” which prohibits funded family planning service providers from referring clients for abortion and requires Title X facilities to be physically separate from facilities that provide abortion. We’ve filed two briefs in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in the ongoing challenge of the rule.
Our first brief, filed in August 2019, explained how the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) analysis underlying the rule was substandard, ignoring its own guidelines for regulatory impact analysis and failing to offer a sufficient explanation for the harms that the rule imposes. In April 2020, we filed a supplemental brief explaining that HHS’s new argument that the harms of the rule are irrelevant contravenes Supreme Court precedent and misunderstands cost-benefit analysis. We urged the court to affirm the district court’s decision.
We previously filed briefs in the Ninth Circuit on the same rule, and Jack Lienke discussed its flaws in an LA Times op-ed.