Dr. Mehmet Oz, formerly a TV show host of “The Dr Oz Show,” was recently appointed by President-elect Donald Trump to be the new head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under the incoming administration. Although not as attention-grabbing as some of Trump’s other picks, Oz’s appointment has some interesting and very direct implications in the ongoing fight to protect preborn children.
Turkish-American Mehmet Oz is a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon with degrees from Harvard and University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Though best known for his long daytime television career, he earned the nomination of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania as a 2022 candidate for the U.S. Senate — a political race which he ultimately lost to incumbent Democrat Senator John Fetterman. During that race, Oz’s views on abortion became more known.
“I do believe that life starts at conception, and I’ve said that multiple times,” he said during a tele-town hall as reported by NBC News. “My mother-in-law wrote a lot of the original pro-life literature in Montgomery County. […] If life starts at conception, why do you care what age their heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.”
He also clarified some earlier remarks about being opposed to six-week abortion bans, claiming that if six weeks wasn’t medically accurate, the pro-life law would be invalidated. He claimed that a baby’s heart begins beating at around nine weeks, but according to the Endowment for Human Development (EHD), this is incorrectly late, even when noting that there are two ways of measuring gestational age. The heart begins to beat between 16 and 22 days after fertilization, though it has not yet formed a full four chambers.
Hours after the Dobbs decision was handed down, Oz stated, “I respect those with a different view, but as a heart surgeon, I’ve held the smallest of human hearts in the palm of my hand, and will defend the sanctity of life,” according to WTIF. “I am relieved that protecting the lives of America’s unborn children will once again be decided by the people through their elected representatives.”
This statement angered many abortion advocates at the time, and the same advocates are now concerned that Oz will soon be sitting at the head of CMS, which has gained infamy among pro-lifers with its aggressively pro-abortion implementation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).
In the wake of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration engaged in a coordinated effort to push abortion at every level of government. As part of this effort, CMS made a rule that abortion was to be considered emergency room “stabilizing care,” thus forcing hospitals that receive Medicaid to commit emergency room induced abortions, preempting any state’s law – even though no state law prevents saving a mother’s life in an emergency. It also enabled Veterans Affairs medical facilities to commit induced abortions, subverting the Hyde Amendment, under the same pretense.
In years since Dobbs, the federal government has “monitored” states with pro-life laws, prompting Idaho and Texas (both of which have pro-life laws that allow for medical emergencies, but prevent the direct and intentional killing of the baby before delivery, which is not medically necessary) to push back. Eventually, their cases made their respective ways to the Supreme Court, which have thus far left in place seemingly contradicting lower court decisions.
When the Biden administration under CMS exercised unelected bureaucracy to define EMTALA as covering induced abortions – something only spelled out and explicitly connected under that administration – they left it vulnerable to being just as easily revoked under subsequent bureaucrats. The concerns of abortion supporters are a problem of their own making.
If the ink being spilled by major abortion supporters and abortion PACs over the ramifications of Oz’s appointment are any indication, pro-lifers have something to hope for when it comes to ending the weaponization of the CMS against pro-life states.
Call on President Trump to pardon the FACE Act prisoners on his first day in office.
