Federal health officials announced a final rule Friday scrapping an Obama-era regulation that forced medical workers to perform abortions despite their religious beliefs.

The Obama administration’s 2016 regulation, already vacated by a court ruling, also redefined sex-based discrimination in health care to include questions of gender identity.

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The old rule would have imposed nearly $3 billion in costs on the economy, the Department of Health and Human Services said in announcing the change. Prompted by the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, the rule had not been implemented after being halted in court.

When Congress passed the Obamacare law in 2010, it included a section broadly prohibiting discrimination among health insurance plans.

Under the  Obama administration, HHS tried to apply that provision to both abortion and gender identity in the 2016 rule. The rule defined gender identity as “one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”

The real-world effects of prioritizing gender identity in health care became clear after a 32-year-old pregnant woman went to the emergency room complaining of abdominal pains and claiming to be a man.

The attending nurse treated the patient as a man, based on the electronic medical record, and the end result was a stillborn baby in a case first reported by The New England Journal of Medicine in May 2019.

“That’s one example where confusion over what the meaning of sex is—whether it’s based on biology or based on gender identity—can have some real-world and in this case tragic consequences. That’s why clarity is so important,” Roger Severino, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, told The Daily Signal.

“This [new] rule will establish clarity over the confusion that was unleashed by the Obama administration’s previous definition, which included male, female, neither, both or some combination, which is very difficult to administer in a health care setting.”

The new rule will enforce the provision by returning to the government’s interpretation of sexual discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word “sex” as male or female and as determined by biology, HHS said.

The 2016 regulation did not recognize sexual orientation as a protected characteristic, and the Trump administration’s rule doesn’t change that.

“The Obama administration itself thought that was a bridge too far. And this final rule leaves undisturbed that judgment from the Obama era,” Severino said. “So if people take issue with that, they should also take issue with the Obama administration as well.”

The Trump administration’s HHS says it will continue to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in health care on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability, age, and sex.

The final rule keeps a section that ensures physical access for individuals with disabilities to health care facilities, as well as communication technology to assist those who have impaired vision or hearing.

(Excerpt from Daily Signal. Article by Fred Lucas.)