In Title IX lawsuit, Texas professors say they won’t accommodate students who get abortions

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CNA Staff, Jun 3, 2024 / 13:55 pm (CNA).

Two university professors in Texas are suing the federal government over its recently revised Title IX rules, stating that they would refuse to abide by the government’s order to offer excused absences and other accommodations to female students who obtain abortions. 

In their lawsuit filed last month, University of Texas-Austin professors Daniel Bonevac and John Hatfield said they “do not intend to accommodate student absences from class to obtain abortions,” including abortions that are illegal under state law as well as “purely elective abortions that are not medically required.”

Nor would the professors “hire a teaching assistant who has violated the abortion laws of Texas or the federal-law prohibitions on the shipment or receipt of abortion pills and abortion-related paraphernalia.”

The U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations in April that radically redefined long-standing federal sex discrimination policy under federal Title IX provisions. 

The new rules “clarify that sex discrimination includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity,” the federal government said at the time. 

The rules also prohibit “discriminating” against a woman for choosing to have an abortion, specifically requiring that schools treat pregnancy and “related conditions” like “any other temporary medical condition,” including giving excused absences for a woman who misses class to have an abortion.

The professors noted in their filing that Texas prohibits abortion in all cases except where a mother’s life is threatened or she faces serious bodily harm.

The federal government in its Title IX directive “purports to preempt Texas’ laws by requiring its schools to protect actions that would otherwise violate state law,” the plaintiffs said.

The “plain language” of Title IX rules, the professors argued, does not include “issues of pregnancy discrimination,” nor does it “require professors to accommodate students who skip class to obtain abortions,” they argued.

More broadly, the federal government’s new rules “fundamentally rewrite Title IX’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination,” the professors said, saying they are “vague and overbroad” in how they qualify sexual harassment.

The University of Texas did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filings. Both Bonevac and Hatfield did not immediately respond to queries on the suits. 

The suit was filed in the United States District Court in the Northern District of Texas. The professors said they sought a permanent injunction against the federal government over the rules. 

In April legal scholars warned that the Biden administration’s interpretation of anti-discrimination rules could also jeopardize state laws that restrict women’s sports and women’s locker rooms to only women.

Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told CNA that the change will have a “catastrophic impact” on women. 

“All of these [anti-discrimination rules] are lumped under the exact same heading of sex,” Perry said, arguing that “sex” under federal law “has always meant [the] biological distinctions between men and women.”