Steven H. Aden, chief legal officer for Americans United for Life, says the federal government is getting creative with its effort to make abortion a federal rather than a state issue and trying to establish in its agencies a federal right to kill babies.
"General law does protect patient privacy, but not in the way the Biden administration wants it to," he begins. "The new rule would make it illegal under federal law for a state to try to get records of a patient who has gone across the border from a pro-life state into a pro-abortion state to get an abortion."
But he asserts the Health Insurance Patience Portability Act does not allow that anyway.
"It applies only to medical providers that are qualified to receive Medicaid, which virtually no abortion center is," Aden notes. "That fact seems to have escaped the attention of the Biden administration, but it surely will not escape the attention of the federal courts when numerous state attorneys general file suit to have the rule set aside."
The proposed regulation is reportedly intended to protect women who live in pro-life states from prosecution if they get an abortion, but states' pro-life laws already exempt women from prosecution; abortionists and abortion traffickers are the ones who risk that when they break the law.
Aden expects a federal court to agree that the law does not hide criminal records related to abortion.
Meanwhile, no public official has sought the medical records of abortion patients.
Last year, when a draft of the new rule was released, a group of 19 Republican attorneys general urged the Health and Human Services agency to ditch the regulation they say "would unlawfully interfere with states' authority to enforce their laws, and does not serve any legitimate need."
"Relying as it does on a false view of state regulation of abortion, the proposed rule is a solution in search of a problem," their letter said.
