The Biden Administration Is Continuing Its Relentless Push for Abortion
Editor’s note: The following piece originally appeared at National Review.
Recent developments in ongoing litigation demonstrate two major points in the national debate over abortion policy and women’s health. First, the Biden administration’s contempt for the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is nearly boundless. Second, the Clinton-era canard that pro-abortion advocates want to keep abortion “safe, legal, and rare” can be dispensed with forever.
Example No. 1 is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s recent ruling that the Biden administration cannot use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to force emergency-room doctors to perform abortions.
Attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom representing the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, alongside the State of Texas, asked the court to keep in place a lower court ruling halting the administration’s abuse of EMTALA to force doctors to harm women and their unborn children in emergency rooms in violation of state law. The appeals court unanimously agreed.
In its decision in the case, State of Texas v. Becerra, the court held that EMTALA doesn’t mention abortion. Instead, EMTALA requires that emergency rooms provide life-saving care to everyone, regardless of ability to pay, including both pregnant women and their unborn children.
In contrast to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently sided with the Biden administration’s unlawful interpretation of EMTALA. In doing so, the decision prevented Idaho’s Defense of Life Act from applying in emergency rooms. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency stay, allowing Idaho to continue to protect the lives of both women and their unborn children, and has agreed to hear Idaho’s case, State of Idaho v. United States of America, in April.
The administration has been engaged in some Olympian feats of semantic gymnastics, because EMTALA clearly requires emergency rooms to provide life-saving care to women and their “unborn children.” This includes providing care for women experiencing ectopic pregnancies, complications from miscarriage, and other life-threatening conditions. Federal law has never required doctors to take a baby’s life when the mother’s life is not in danger. And Idaho’s law similarly protects the lives of both women and their unborn children, preventing physicians from ending an unborn child’s life, unless doing so is critical to save the life of the mother.
To assert that “stabilizing care” for mother and child actually means ending the life of an unborn baby requires a total disregard for human dignity, refusal to provide better options for women, and zealous devotion to the political agenda of abortion on demand. This brazen attempt to contort the language of federal law to circumvent or preempt state laws intended to protect both the health and safety of women and their children is merely the latest effort post-Dobbs to impose a top-down abortion policy by fiat.
That approach isn’t limited to surgical abortions. When abortion drugs first hit the market, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required doctors to provide ongoing care for women using the drugs, including an initial in-person visit to check for ectopic pregnancies and other serious conditions and a follow-up visit to identify life-threatening complications such as internal bleeding and infection. The FDA’s own label for these abortion drugs indicates that roughly one in 25 women who take the drugs will end up in the emergency room. After requiring critical safety standards for 16 years, the FDA betrayed women and girls and removed these standards.
Showing the agency’s cruel indifference to women’s health, the FDA approved the drugs to be delivered through the mail directly to women and girls — without them ever meeting with a doctor. Nothing about leaving young girls to take these drugs all alone at home with no medical attention is “safe, legal, and rare.” The FDA even eliminated the requirement for health-care providers to report any serious, nonfatal complications from the drug. As the saying goes, “there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.”
The Supreme Court will hear argument in the case of U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in March.
Whether it is using EMTALA to force emergency-room doctors to endanger the lives of women or abandoning women and girls in their homes or dorm rooms to face life-threatening complications of abortion drugs on their own, the executive branch of our federal government has made clear its callous disregard for pregnant women and their unborn children, not to mention the American people’s right to empower women and protect life in their states without federal-government coercion. The Supreme Court will have its opportunity to rein in the administration’s brazen overreach this spring.
