The Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear the Biden administration’s appeal of a case in which it would would force Texas hospitals to commit abortions as emergency stabilizing “treatment,” leaving a lower court’s decision in place.
After the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration’s department of Health and Human Services (HHS) invoked the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) to issue federal guidance in July of the same year. EMTALA is a law that requires hospitals to treat emergency medical conditions and stabilize patients, such that their conditions will likely not deteriorate in the immediate future.
The Biden administration took that guidance a step further, directing that hospitals had to provide “emergency” abortions, preempting any state pro-life law — or risk losing federal funds.
Texas sued the Biden administration, saying among other things that the rule was improperly applied, that it violates the Hyde amendment by making federal funding dependent on providing abortions, and that nothing in EMTALA supports an abortion mandate. “EMTALA does not mandate access to abortion or codify a right to an abortion as ‘stabilizing treatment’ for an ’emergency medical condition.’ The Abortion Mandate cites no other federal law that would authorize or require an abortion. No federal statute, including EMTALA, supersedes or preempts the States’ power to regulate or prohibit abortion,” read the suit in part.
READ: A growing number of Americans call themselves ‘pro-choice’ – but what’s really behind it?
The Supreme Court’s move leaves in place the earlier 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Texas’ favor, stating that “EMTALA does not govern the practice of medicine.” However, the questions of the case remain unresolved at the national level.
Separately, Idaho also sued the administration. As Live Action News reported in that case:
... the U.S. Supreme Court sent Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States back to a lower court, reinstating an injunction on Idaho’s Defense of Life Act. This means that should an “emergency abortion” become absolutely necessary to protect a pregnant woman in any of the very narrow possible circumstances where Idaho’s law conflicts with the federal EMTALA rules, doctors in Idaho must provide that “emergency abortion” as a “stabilizing treatment.” A press release quote from Idaho AG Raúl Labrador noted:
The Biden administration’s concession that EMTALA will rarely override Idaho’s law caused the Supreme Court to ask the 9th Circuit for review in light of the federal government’s change in position. Justice Barrett wrote, those concessions mean that Idaho’s Defense of Life Act ‘remains almost entirely intact.’ The 9th Circuit’s decision should be easy. As Justice Alito explained well: the Biden administration’s ‘preemption theory is plainly unsound.’
Abortion, defined as the intentional and direct killing of a preborn child, is not health care and is not medically necessary, despite the efforts of the media to portray instances of insufficient medical care as the direct consequence of pro-life laws.
When a mother’s life is in danger, it is not necessary to kill her baby before performing a labor induction or an emergency c-section in an effort to save both lives, or to remove an ectopic pregnancy. Additionally, all of these procedures are legal under Texas’ heartbeat law, which contains a legal carve-out for medical emergencies.
