Appeals Court Rules Joe Biden Can’t Force Texas to Turn ERs Into Abortion Centers
In a huge pro-life victory, a federal appeals court has ruled that Joe Biden can’t exploit a federal law to try to force Texas to turn emergency rooms into abortion centers.
As LifeNews previously reported, last year a federal district court in Texas issued an order blocking the Biden administration’s attempt to force the state’s emergency room doctors to perform abortions—regardless of whether doing so violates their religious beliefs.
Judge James Wesley Hendrix determined that the state of Texas and two groups of pro-life physicians were likely to prevail in their case against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Hendrix issued his order in a case called Texas et al., v. Xavier Becerra, et al.
Today, a federal appeals court agreed.
“The question before the court is whether EMTALA, according to HHS’s Guidance, mandates physicians to provide abortions when that is the necessary stabilizing treatment for an emergency medical condition. It does not. We therefore decline to expand the scope of EMTALA,” a three-judge panel of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said in a unanimous ruling.
The state of Texas, together with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Christian Medical & Dental Associations, sued the Biden administration to challenge its abortion mandate in, which was based creatively on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA.
Texas and the other plaintiffs argued that the Biden administration’s mandate unlawfully requires abortions in situations where Texas outlaws them under its own law, the Texas Human Life Protection Act.
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ADF attorneys representing the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, tell LifeNews that this is a case concerning the illegal use of federal law to force emergency room doctors to perform abortions. They asked the federal appeals court to keep in place a lower court ruling halting the Biden administration from employing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to force doctors to provide elective abortions in emergency rooms.
“Hospitals—especially emergency rooms—are centers for preserving life. The government has no business transforming them into abortion clinics,” said ADF Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Ryan Bangert, who will be arguing before the court. “Doctors shouldn’t be forced to break the Hippocratic Oath, and they shouldn’t have to choose between violating their deeply held beliefs or facing stiff financial penalties and being barred from the Medicare program. Emergency room physicians can, and do, treat ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions. But elective abortion is not life-saving care—it ends the life of the unborn child—and the government has no authority to force doctors to perform these dangerous procedures. We urge the court to uphold the lower court’s ruling and allow emergency rooms to fulfill their primary function—saving lives.”
Congress enacted EMTALA in 1986 to ensure public access to emergency services regardless of whether an individual could pay. Section 1867 of the Social Security Act imposes specific obligations on Medicare-participating hospitals offering emergency services to provide a medical screening examination or treatment for an emergency medical condition, including active labor, regardless of financial ability.
Hospitals are required to provide stabilizing treatment for patients with what are called emergency medical conditions. If a Medicare-participating hospital is unable to stabilize a patient, or if the patient requests, the hospital transfers the patient to another facility.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra issued federal guidance in July, arguing that the 1986 law “protects [the] clinical judgment and the action that [doctors] take to provide stabilizing medical treatment to [their] pregnant patients,” regardless of any abortion restriction in their state.
Simple enough, right?
But then Becerra stretched the limits of law and common sense with this reading of the law on emergency medical treatment, saying:
[If] a physician believes that a pregnant patient presenting at an emergency department, including certain labor and delivery departments, 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. And when a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the life and health of the pregnant person—or draws the exception more narrowly than EMTALA’s emergency medical condition definition—that state law is preempted.
That interpretation means that under the HHS mandate, the federal government’s own definition of “emergency medical condition” would preempt any state definition that is more narrowly tailored. It also means that elective abortions would qualify as “emergency medical conditions.”
Is this a proper reading of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act? Far from it. It’s a poorly disguised attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.
How do we know this? Because EMTALA requires health care providers (more precisely, federally funded Medicare-participating hospitals) to provide stabilizing treatment of emergency medical conditions that pose serious jeopardy to patients, including the pregnant woman’s “unborn child” (a phrase used four times in the law).
The law does not mandate, direct, approve, or even suggest the provision of any specific treatment. It says nothing about requiring abortion.
Hendrix pointed this out in his order granting the plaintiffs’ requested relief to Texas and the two medical groups, stating that Becerra’s guidance from HHS:
goes well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent as to abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict. Since the statute is silent on the question, the guidance cannot answer how doctors should weigh risks to both a mother and her unborn child. Nor can it, in doing so, create a conflict with state law where one does not exist. The guidance was thus unauthorized.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, Hendrix highlighted, explicitly “protects both mothers and unborn children,” something the HHS guidance ignored.
The judge summarized:
[The guidance] discards the requirement to consider the welfare of unborn children when determining how to stabilize a pregnant woman; it claims to preempt state laws notwithstanding explicit provisions to the contrary; and it impermissibly interferes with the practice of medicine in violation of the Medicare Act. Because HHS’s guidance is a statement of policy that establishes or changes a substantive legal standard, it likewise was subject to notice-and-comment requirements—requirements unfulfilled here.
In a case similar to the one in Texas, the Justice Department filed suit Aug. 2 against the state of Idaho, hoping to undermine its new law prohibiting most abortions by claiming that the state law conflicts with EMTALA and medical treatment for pregnant women in emergency rooms.
U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill found Wednesday that Idaho’s law conflicts with the federal law because it bans abortions in nearly all circumstances.
Idaho’s law does, however, allow a doctor to raise as an affirmative defense in a criminal case that he or she determined that an abortion was necessary to save the patient’s life.
Disagreeing, Winmill noted that the Idaho law puts doctors to the “impossible task of attempting to simultaneously comply with both federal and state law” and that “state law must yield to federal law when it’s impossible to comply with both.”
Scholars also have noted that if Idaho hospital administrators believe they can’t comply with both state and federal law, they simply could decline the Medicare funding that subjects them to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act in the first place.
Idaho likely will appeal Winmill’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
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