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The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case that President Joe Biden’s administration had filed to enforce federal regulations in Texas requiring hospitals to perform abortions if they are necessary to stabilize a patient’s emergency medical condition.
The justices rejected the Justice Department’s appeal of a lower court’s decision to bar the use of the advice in Texas, where Republicans have supported a nearly complete abortion ban, and against members of two anti-abortion medical groups.
In July 2022, the Biden administration released the guidelines to protect access to abortion after the conservative majority on the Supreme Court overturned the historic Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 that made abortion legal across the country.
“The guidance reminded healthcare providers across the country of their obligations under a 1986 federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala) to ensure Medicare-participating hospitals offer emergency care stabilizing patients regardless of their ability to pay. Medicare is the government healthcare program for the elderly. Hospitals that violate Emtala risk losing Medicare funding,” The Guardian reported.
“The guidance made clear that under that law physicians must provide a woman an abortion if needed to resolve a medical emergency and stabilize the patient even in states where the procedure is banned, and that the measure pre-empts state bans that offer no exceptions for medical emergencies or with exceptions that are too narrow,” the outlet added.
You can’t have an abortion in Texas unless the pregnancy puts the woman at risk of dying or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, two anti-abortion medical organizations, sued the administration, alleging that the guidance illegally tries to force doctors to perform abortions.
A US district judge named James Wesley Hendrix stopped the advice from going into effect in 2022 because he thought it was an illegal interpretation of the Emtala law and would allow more abortions than Texas law allows.
On January 2, the fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld it by stating that “Emtala does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion.” A month before the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, Texas’s highest court turned down a woman’s request for an emergency abortion of her unviable pregnancy.
Proponents of abortion rights have questioned the limits of exceptions to abortion bans in several states because it’s not clear, even among doctors, what kinds of medical situations during pregnancy would allow doctors to perform the procedure.
In a case like this one in June, the Supreme Court said that pregnant women in Idaho who are having medical crises could have abortions for now.
In the Idaho case, the high court upheld a federal judge’s ruling that Emtala takes precedence over Idaho’s nearly complete abortion ban, which has Republican support.
The justices lifted a hold they had put on the judge’s decision in the case, but they didn’t settle the dispute on its own terms. Instead, they threw it out as “improvably granted.”
Earlier this week, the Georgia Supreme Court paused a ruling that had struck down the state’s near-total ban on abortions while it reviewed the state’s appeal.
The Associated Press reports that the state high court’s order was issued a week after a judge determined that Georgia’s law unconstitutionally prohibits abortions after approximately six weeks of pregnancy, often before women are aware they are pregnant.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled on September 30 that privacy rights under Georgia’s state constitution encompass the right to make personal healthcare decisions.
The state Supreme Court suspended McBurney’s ruling at the request of Republican State Attorney General Chris Carr, whose office is filing the appeal.
