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That’s what happened on the first business day of 2024, when the ultraconservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that a federal law requiring hospitals to provide emergency care doesn’t mean that they must perform abortions in situations when continuing the pregnancy would place the woman’s life or health in “serious jeopardy.”

If this sounds familiar, it should. Remember Kate Cox, the woman whose fetus suffered from a devastating genetic disorder and whose continued pregnancy threatened her fertility? The Texas Supreme Court turned her away — despite a state law that supposedly allows abortions when the woman’s life is in danger or there is “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” — and she was forced to leave the state to obtain an abortion.

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Now comes the 5th Circuit — with a panel composed of two Trump-appointed judges and a third nominated by George W. Bush — to say that the federal emergency care law doesn’t help women in these desperate circumstances either.

The 1986 law, known as Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, was intended to stop the practice of hospitals “dumping” indigent patients who turned up at emergency rooms. It requires them to provide offered “necessary stabilizing treatment” for “emergency medical conditions” or risk losing Medicare funding.

The Biden administration invoked the law in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion. The Department of Health and Human Services issued “guidance” to hospitals stating that they must provide abortions when a pregnant patient “is experiencing an emergency medical condition” and “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve that condition.”

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Texas sued, arguing that EMTALA doesn’t compel hospitals to perform abortions in emergency circumstances. A Trump-nominated district judge agreed, and the 5th Circuit on Tuesday upheld that ruling in an opinion written by Kurt Engelhardt and joined by fellow Trump nominee Cory Wilson and Bush-appointed Leslie Southwick.

“We agree with the district court that EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA poses equal stabilization obligations,” Engelhardt wrote.

The Biden administration’s brief in the case opened with a powerful description of the real-world stakes. “Sepsis, seizures, uncontrollable bleeding, organ failure, cardiac arrest — all of these can result from pregnancy-related complications, and all can lead to devastating medical consequences,” wrote Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton. “Texas asserts that it is a State’s prerogative to permit such harms. … But that is untenable: It jeopardizes the lives and health of individuals experiencing emergency pregnancy complications, and it forces emergency-room physicians to withhold treatment in the face of a patchwork of state restrictions and uncertain........

© Washington Post