April 22, 2024
Idaho scored a pro-life major victory in January when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the state to enforce its own laws protecting preborn life. According to reporting from CBS at the time: “The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to let Idaho enforce its near-total ban on abortion in certain emergency medical situations while legal proceedings continue and said it will take up the dispute involving whether the Biden administration can require under federal law hospitals in states that ban abortion to perform the procedure on pregnant patients whose lives are at risk.”
READ: Idaho Holds the Line Against Abortion with SCOTUS Win Protecting Life
However, the fight isn’t over yet. The Biden Administration is trying to weaponize a federal regulation to force states to provide abortions in emergency rooms, regardless of state laws. This law, known as EMTALA — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act – was designed to require hospitals to stabilize all patients in the emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay.
According to an NIH published report: “In July 2022, the (Department of Health and Human Services) HSS issued guidance to clarify that EMTALA requires abortion care despite contrary state laws” — also claiming that federal law trumped states laws on abortion. (emphasis added). Basically, Biden’s HHS tried to change a regulation to force states that respect preborn life to do abortions in emergency rooms.
The Biden Administration has twisted the EMTALA regulation designed to demand life-saving care for people without resources into demands for death by intentional abortion.
This also highlights the inherent problem with the “abortion is a states’ rights ONLY issue” argument – even if states manage to secure a strong pro-life law, the abortion extremists in the Biden administration will not let it go.
And that’s the core argument that’s at play in the upcoming court case Idaho v. United States of America W. According to reporting by SCOTUS Blog: “The legislature contended that the use of EMTALA to compel emergency rooms in Idaho to perform abortions also violates the major questions doctrine, the idea that if Congress wants to give a federal agency the power to make decisions having a vast economic or political significance, it must say so directly. The law’s “spare directive” to emergency rooms to provide “stabilizing treatment” “does not convey clear authorization to regulate abortion in all 50 states,” the legislature suggested.
The Biden administration countered that EMTALA was not simply intended to ensure that patients with insurance and those without it receive the same treatment. Instead, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote, the law requires Medicare-funded hospitals to provide whatever treatment is required to stabilize a patient’s medical condition. And nothing in the law, Prelogar stressed, limits that treatment to treatment permitted by state law.”
If you blink you might miss it – the federal government’s argument is that “Medicare-funded hospitals” need to provide whatever “treatment is required to stabilize a patient’s medical condition.”
However, abortion doesn’t do that – abortion only hurts women and ends a preborn life. And any medical act that needs to remove a stillborn or miscarried baby isn’t an abortion by definition.
Abortion is the intentional termination of a living preborn baby.
Additionally, no state in the country requires that a woman’s life be ended because of their medical status, pregnant or otherwise. It simply does not exist, and all medical personnel are free under law to do whatever is necessary to save the lives of their patients.
EMTALA is a law with good intentions and a noble purpose – but like so many laws in the Biden administrations grasp, it’s being turned into a weapon against preborn lives and the states that seek to protect them.
If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is.