A federal judge in Texas on Dec. 31 issued a nationwide injunction halting enforcement of Obama administration protections for transgender and abortion-related health care services just one day before they were due to go into effect.
The lawsuit — brought by Texas, a handful of other states, and some religiously affiliated nonprofit medical groups — challenges a regulation implementing the sex nondiscrimination requirement found in the Affordable Care Act.
The Health and Human Services regulation “forbids discriminating on the basis of ‘gender identity’ and ‘termination of pregnancy'” under Obamacare, as U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in his opinion halting enforcement of those provisions in the rule.
The states allege that the regulation violates the Administrative Procedure Act.
