Is a Public Health Emergency Declaration a Good Strategy in Response to Dobbs?

(A very interesting read)


Is a Public Health Emergency Declaration a Good Strategy in Response to Dobbs?
7/19/2022 by Carrie N. Baker



Abortion rights activists outside the White House on July 9, 2022, denounce the Supreme Court decision to end federal abortion rights protections. (Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

In a Washington Post opinion editorial on June 30, CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights Nancy Northup called on the Biden administration to declare a public health emergency for abortion in response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Northup argued that a public health emergency declaration would allow the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to help patients obtain abortion care, as well as enable out-of-state prescribing and dispensing of medication abortion in states banning abortion. On July 8, the Biden administration issued an executive order to expand access to abortion healthcare, which Texas immediately challenged in court—but the president has not yet declared a public health emergency.

The Network for Public Health Law has issued a report laying out the U.S. government’s powers to address public health emergencies under several federal laws, including the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (the PREP Act), which provides federal preemption of state laws and immunity from lawsuits for those acting to address a declared public health emergency.

Ms. spoke with leading reproductive health law scholar and Temple law professor Rachel Rebouché about the strengths and limitations of a public health emergency declaration for increasing access to abortion healthcare.

Carrie Baker: Would a public health emergency declaration allow for concrete steps to protect abortion access?

Rebouché: The PREP Act is targeted at countermeasures for pandemics and epidemics. Countermeasures are defined under the statute to include, for instance, drugs that help mitigate or treat the effects of an epidemic or pandemic. The idea is that when there’s a public emergency and a communicable disease, you want to be able to deploy things like vaccines quickly. In order to do that, the act shields providers who are delivering these medicines from liability and it preempts state laws that would contradict this work.


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But nothing is going to change without intervention. We don’t have a statute. We don’t have constitutional protection. But the federal government is not powerless on the issue of abortion, and so what are the tools at its disposal? This might be an effective tool.

https://msmagazine.com/2022/07/19/public-health-emergency-biden-abortion/