This week, a valuable health protection law, the Emtala (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act) provided guidance that required hospitals to stabilise patients facing medical emergencies, including emergency abortion services. This is only one of Trump’s daily policy outrages, which aim to destroy the lives of everyone he looks down his nose at, including women. This threatens to endanger pregnant patients’ lives even more than they are already endangered — but only if doctors fail to uphold their sworn duty.
Emtala guidance clarified that hospitals in states with abortion bans cannot turn away pregnant patients who are in the midst of medical emergencies by providing health-saving and lifesaving abortion care. The move comes amid multiple Republican dominated states’ court battles over the guidance. States such as Idaho and Texas have argued that the Biden administration’s guidance on Emtala in relation to abortion care, which was issued in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, interpreted the decades-old Emtala guidance incorrectly. False!
The Trump administration’s announcement came the same day as an anti-abortion religious group challenging the guidance decided to dismiss its own case: Catholic Medical Association v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. So Trump took it up instead.
Fatima Goss Graves, head of the National Women’s Law Center, said: “To be clear: this action doesn’t change hospitals’ legal obligations, but it does add to the fear, confusion, and dangerous delays patients and providers have faced since the fall of Roe v. Wade. At the same time, this administration claims it is considering ways to support ‘population growth’ but it is actively dismantling the systems that protect pregnant people’s health and lives. The hypocrisy is staggering. No matter what political games the administration wants to play, we will continue to stand with the patients, doctors, and hospitals fighting every day to do what is right.”
For nearly four decades, EMTALA has been understood by medical providers and the federal government — including both Democratic and Republican administrations — to require abortion care when that care is needed to stabilize pregnant patients in a medical crisis. As Doctors for America’s motion to intervene emphasized, stripping away EMTALA’s protections would put doctors in legal chaos and force them to violate what is in fact always their sworn duty: to save lives and prevent harm. Which is exactly why, legally, they cannot violate their sworn duty.
SOURCE: American Civil Liberties Union, 3 June 2025 + VISUAL