When it comes to a pregnant patient suffering a medical emergency, who do we trust to make a difficult call in a difficult situation? The patient and the doctor treating them? State legislators with no medical training?
Or maybe the fetus itself should have a say. “Sure, I’m killing you, but I think I’m the one who should get to live.”
You may think I sound ridiculous, but this seems to be the reasoning behind the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in Texas v. Becerra, Texas’ cooked-up challenge to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).
EMTALA is a federal statute that requires Medicare-funded hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment to any patient who shows up in the emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The Biden administration appeared to be ready to use EMTALA as a lifeline for people in abortion-hostile states who find themselves needing life-saving abortions in hospitals where doctors are reluctant to provide such care out of a very real fear of breaking the law.
Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration issued guidance clarifying that EMTALA’s requirement that Medicare-funded hospitals provide stabilizing treatment included a requirement to provide abortion care if necessary.
This wasn’t a policy shift. Nor was it an effort to turn poor “pro-life” doctors into servants of Big Abortion.
Fetuses can neither physically nor philosophically make a choice about what kind of health care will be provided to the person carrying them. And to argue otherwise is to assign a level of “personhood” to a fetus that the Supreme Court has not been willing to assign (yet).
It was simply a polite tap on the shoulder from the federal government to abortion-hostile states like Texas that believe their total abortion bans should trump the federal requirement to provide life-saving abortion care, not just when a patient is on death’s door, but also when a patient’s health is in serious jeopardy. It was just a heads up, as if to say, “Hey, abortion is health care, and if it’s required to stabilize a patient, then you have to do it.”
Texas, of course, became immediately hysterical and filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services, even though it’s not customary to........