President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday rescinded a Biden-era guideline around emergency abortion care.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The Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rescinded the 2022 guidance around the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, also known as EMTALA.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The guidance was published by the Biden administration after the Supreme Court repealed federal abortion protections as a reminder to physicians that EMTALA, a federal law, supersedes any state abortion ban.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.
