President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday rescinded a Biden-era guideline around emergency abortion care. The move has no direct legal impacts on care, but it sends a clear message on where the Trump administration stands on abortion access.
Abortion advocates also tell HuffPost that the guideline repeal will create more confusion for physicians on the ground, and lead to more delays and denials of care.
The Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rescinded the 2022 guidance around the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, also known as EMTALA. EMTALA requires hospitals that participate in Medicare — the majority of hospitals in the country — to offer abortion care if it’s necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they’re experiencing a medical emergency.
The guidance was published by the Biden administration after the Supreme Court repealed federal abortion protections as a reminder to physicians that EMTALA, a federal law, supersedes any state abortion ban.
“As frontline health care providers, the federal EMTALA statute protects your clinical judgment and the action that you take to provide stabilizing medical treatment to your pregnant patients, regardless of the restrictions in the state where you practice,” then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra wrote.
Trump’s CMS stated that the previous guidance and accompanying letter “do not reflect the policy of this Administration.”
“The obligation to provide emergency abortion care comes from EMTALA itself, a federal statute written by Congress,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, told HuffPost. “The Trump administration does not have the power to simply erase that with the stroke of a pen.”
“But it absolutely sends an ominous signal about what this administration is going to attempt to do after promising not to interfere with emergency abortions,” she said.
The announcement came the same day anti-abortion group Catholic Medical Association announced it was dismissing its case, Catholic Medical Association v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and challenging the guidance. Although the guidance simply underlined current federal law, rescinding it will throw physicians into legal chaos.
“The Trump administration doesn’t want you to know it, but they just quietly erased guidance that informed hospitals of their obligation to provide lifesaving care for pregnant women facing health care emergencies, like severe hemorrhage or sepsis – circumstances where the only option to save a woman’s life may be emergency abortion care,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a Tuesday statement.
“Once again, the Trump administration is sending a clear message that they do not care about women’s lives, and they don’t care how many pregnant women they force into health care crises so long as they can continue to advance their extreme anti-abortion agenda.”
There have been many reports of pregnant women across the country — in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma and elsewhere — who were denied emergency abortion care because they weren’t close enough to death. The decision to revoke these guidelines will create further confusion for emergency care providers who are simply trying to do their jobs.
The Supreme Court rejected an attack on emergency abortion care in Idaho last summer, but pro-choice groups cautioned against calling it a win. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision was “not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho” but instead “it is delay.”
“Complying with this law can mean the difference between life and death for pregnant people, forcing providers like me to choose between caring for someone in their time of need and turning my back on them to comply with cruel and dangerous laws,” Dr. Jamila Perritt, OB-GYN, abortion provider and president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement.
“As a doctor, I have a moral and ethical obligation to provide emergency care to those in need, including EMTALA’s mandate to provide abortion care when it is necessary and stabilizing treatment,” Perritt added. “This action does not change that.”