A U.S. district court ordered a stop to guidelines issued by the Biden administration that directed hospitals to conduct abortions if the procedure is deemed necessary to stabilize a pregnant woman suffering an emergency medical condition, even if local or state laws forbid the practice.
Judge James Hendrix ruled on August 23 in favor of Texas’ legal complaint asking for relief from federal regulations that suggested healthcare providers “must” provide abortions in certain instances, even if doing so would violate state laws.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which ruled that “there is no constitutional right to abortion,” President Joe Biden and members of his administration took steps to circumvent the decision.
President Biden’s original executive order, as reported by The Dallas Express, claimed that “the Federal Government is taking action to protect healthcare service delivery and promote access to critical reproductive healthcare services, including abortion.”
He ordered Xavier Becerra, the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), to identify options “to protect and expand access to abortion care, including medication abortion.”
Shortly after that, Becerra issued a letter to healthcare providers insisting that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) passed in 1986 now included abortion within its definition of emergency or life-saving treatment:
“Thus, if a physician believes that a pregnant patient presenting at an emergency department … is experiencing an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA, and that abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve that condition, the physician must provide that treatment.”
Furthermore, he indicated to providers that their “professional and legal duty to provide stabilizing medical treatment … preempts any directly conflicting state law that might otherwise prohibit such treatment.”
In response to this, the State of Texas sued Becerra and other federal officials and agencies, condemning what it considered an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
The legal complaint suggested that “No federal statute confers a right to abortion. EMTALA is no different. It does not guarantee access to abortion. On the contrary, EMTALA contemplates that an emergency medical condition is one that threatens the life of the unborn child.”
Judge Hendrix delivered his decision last week, explaining that “The Supreme Court’s holding in Dobbs that the Constitution confers no right to an abortion caused a sea change, generating novel questions about the interplay of federal and state law.”
Pointing to the belief that Becerra’s letter went “well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children,” Hendrix concluded that the federal government “may not enforce the Guidance and Letter’s interpretation that Texas abortion laws are preempted by EMTALA.”
The original complaint from Texas and the district court’s decision noted that the state’s Human Life Protection Act permits abortions when the pregnant woman “has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death.”
