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<\/div>\nPresident Joe Biden signed an executive order on July 8 directing federal agencies to take steps within their power to safeguard abortions and reproductive health services, including ensuring the availability of emergency contraceptive medications and providing legal protection for out-of-state patients and abortion providers.<\/p>\n
The order is in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization<\/em>, which allows individual states to restrict access to abortion services. In addition to the executive order, the White House issued a fact sheet<\/a> on its efforts to protect access to legal abortions.<\/p>\n Biden’s order requires the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to:<\/p>\n Joyce Alene White Vance, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017, tweeted that the federal government can help<\/a> protect access to abortion-related travel, First Amendment rights to share information regarding access to legal abortions and, subject to future litigation, abortion-related drugs. “Biden’s order formalizes this,” she said, and the measures are consistent with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statement<\/a> on the day of the Dobbs<\/em> opinion.<\/p>\n According to Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, the president’s actions “have been carefully vetted within the White House Counsel’s Office and at [the Department of Justice] and are assuredly within the president’s legal authority<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Emergency Contraception<\/p>\n The president directed HHS to “take additional actions to expand access to the full range of reproductive health services,” including family planning services and providers, along with access to “emergency contraception and long-acting reversible contraception like intrauterine devices (IUDs),” according to the White House fact sheet.<\/p>\n Emergency contraception refers to so-called “morning-after” pills that can be taken to prevent pregnancy up to three days after unprotected sex, under certain conditions. <\/p>\n Ben Conley, an attorney with Seyfarth in Chicago, said there are unresolved legal questions about employer health plans that cover abortifacients<\/a>, which are drugs that cause abortions, and many employers are revisiting the extent to which they cover abortifacient drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol.<\/p>\n Access to abortifacient drugs through telehealth may not be a long-term option in states restricting abortion because more states are starting to limit access to them, Conley said.<\/p>\n According to an alert by national law firm Spencer Fane, the Affordable Care Act and its implementing regulations require employers to cover the costs of contraceptives<\/a> approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including “hormonal treatment (such as birth control pills), sterilization (tubal ligation for women), and emergency contraception (such as Plan B). The contraceptive coverage mandate does not, however, include abortifacient medications,” which the law distinguishes from emergency contraception.<\/p>\n Garland recently asserted that federal law would pre-empt state bans on FDA-approved birth control, including emergency contraception, the attorneys noted.<\/p>\n Abortion-Related Travel<\/p>\n The president’s order directs the attorney general to “provide technical assistance to states affording legal protection to out-of-state patients as well as providers who offer legal reproductive health care.”<\/p>\n Legal issues have been raised<\/a> about providing travel benefits for employees to receive abortions. Meredith Kirshenbaum, a principal in the Chicago office of law firm Goldberg Kohn, said that in states such as Texas, where a new state law bans most abortions after about six weeks and allows private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” a prohibited abortion, that “we are likely to see litigation of this issue” of employers reimbursing abortion travel and providing related benefits.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, many prominent U.S. companies are publicizing their support for abortion-travel benefits<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other Actions<\/p>\n The president also:<\/p>\n\n
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