Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), Secretary Xavier Becerra, and other members of the Biden Administration for adopting a rule that purports to nullify parents’ state-law rights to consent to their children’s medical care.
For more than 50 years, the Title X statute of the federal Public Health Service Act has provided grants to increase the availability of “comprehensive voluntary family planning services.” While HHS distributes these federally funded grants, organizations receiving funds must still comply with relevant state laws. Previously, a federal district court and a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that Title X projects must comply with Texas’s parental-consent laws when dispensing prescription contraceptives to minors.
Yet the Biden Administration’s agency rule defies this binding legal precedent by forbidding Title X projects from obtaining parental consent before providing contraceptives to minors, even though Texas law and the precedent of the Fifth Circuit require it. The lawsuit brought by Attorney General Paxton demands that the courts vacate this patently unlawful agency rule and issue a permanent injunction against its continued enforcement.
“By attempting to force Texas healthcare providers to offer contraceptives to children without parental consent, the Biden Administration continues to prove they will do anything to implement their extremist agenda—even undermine the Constitution and violate the law,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Federal courts have already shut down their previous attack on parental rights, and I will ensure that we stop them once again.”
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