A federal court this week blocked the Biden administration’s mandate requiring doctors and faith-based hospitals to perform abortions and transgender surgeries.
The ruling came as the Supreme Court grapples with whether to weigh in on a similar legal battle between a Catholic hospital and a transgender man over his hysterectomy.
The Northern District of Texas federal court ruled Monday the administration cannot require doctors and providers to violate tenets of their faith in order to perform or offer transgender procedures and services for patients.
As part of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration — and now the Biden administration — has mandated that providers offer such treatments or face financial penalties and litigation.
The case out of Texas was brought by the Franciscan Alliance, a network of religious hospitals, and associations of roughly 20,000 medical professionals, who successfully argued the requirement infringed on their rights under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, a 1993 federal law that protects religious liberty.
“Christian Plaintiffs contend that violation of their statutory rights […] is an irreparable harm. The Court agrees and concludes that enforcement of the 2021 Interpretation forces Christian Plaintiffs to face civil penalties or to perform gender-transition procedures and abortions contrary to their religious beliefs—a quintessential irreparable injury,” wrote Judge Reed O’Connor, a Bush appointee, in the 23-page opinion.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the case. It has roughly 60 days to decide whether or not to appeal to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Becket Fund, a religious liberty legal group that represented the health care providers, noted this is the third time a federal court has had to strike down such a policy.
In 2016, a federal court in North Dakota halted the administration’s transgender rule and in 2019, another federal court struck it down.
Since President Biden came into office, though, the litigation renewed after the new administration said it would revisit the same rule.
Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said the ruling is a win for compassion and conscience.
“No doctor should be forced to perform controversial, medically unsupported procedures that are contrary to their conscience and could be deeply harmful to their patients,” he said.
The conflict between religious liberty and LGBT rights is already pending before the Supreme Court in a case brought by a Catholic hospital after a transgender man sued the facility, arguing it violated California’s civil rights law by not performing a hysterectomy on him.
The case of Dignity Health, Mercy San Juan Medical Center v Evan Minton involves a biological woman who lives as a man. The biological woman sought to have a hysterectomy, but after the Catholic hospital discovered the reason for the surgery, it was canceled.
The patient, Mr. Minton, received the surgery from a nonreligious hospital but still sued over the alleged discrimination.
The lower court ruled for him, prompting the hospital to go to the Supreme Court and ask the justices to review the dispute, citing the Catholic hospital’s First Amendment rights.
The high court petition has been unresolved since March of 2020, and the justices have not yet decided whether to grant oral arguments on the matter. The court will return in October from its summer break.
Steven Collins, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the court rulings thus far on religious objections to transgender services have been mixed.
“As I read the judicial tea leaves, I don’t think either side is going to get an outright victory in these cases. We will continue to see … a victory for one side in one case and a victory for the other side in the next. That will likely continue until both sides on these culture war issues can come together to reach a legislative solution,” he said.
There’s also a case out of New York awaiting review from the high court that grapples with religious employers and whether the state can require them to provide insurance coverage for employees that includes abortion, according to Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School.
Like the transgender case, it is undetermined whether the court will agree to hear the matter.
“There is a steady trickle of these kinds of cases,” Mr. Laycock said.
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