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Biden administration sues to block Idaho’s protective abortion law

Aug 2, 2022

By Dave Andrusko

Vowing to “use every tool at our disposal,” Attorney General Merrick Garland filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Idaho’s comprehensive protective abortion law.

“In the days since the Dobbs decision, there have been widespread reports of delays or denials to pregnant women experiencing medical emergencies,” Garland alleged at a news conference. “We will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that pregnant women get the medical care that they are entitled to.”

The Justice Department is suing under what is called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act [EMTALA] . This Act states that hospitals receiving Medicare funds “must provide medical treatment necessary to stabilize that condition before transferring or discharging the patient,” according to Tuesday’s lawsuit.

“The Idaho law would make it a criminal offense for doctors to comply with EMTALA’s requirement to provide stabilizing treatment, even where a doctor determines that abortion is the medical treatment necessary to prevent a patient from suffering severe health risks or even death,” the Department of Justice [DOJ] charged.

But the claim is blatantly false. “Idaho’s abortion ban permits a physician who does an abortion to raise the affirmative defense that the abortion was necessary to save the mother’s life or that the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest that was reported,” according to  Micaiah Bilger. “In both cases, the physician must choose a procedure that is most likely to save the life of the baby and protect the mother. The law explicitly excludes contraception from the definition of abortion, and women upon whom abortions are performed.”

Furthermore, according to Emily Cook of Texas Right to Life, “EMTALA is a federal law that requires public hospitals to stabilize and care for any patient who needs emergency treatment, regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. President Ronald Reagan championed and signed EMTALA into law in 1986 to ensure that vulnerable patients, including pregnant mothers in labor, would receive essential care for themselves and their preborn children. With tragic irony, Biden is now trying to use what has been a life-saving law for almost four decades to sanction the killing of unborn children.

“Along with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published memos (CMS, HHS) mandating that a doctor must commit an abortion whenever it is the ‘necessary stabilizing treatment.’ By including abortion within the definition of ‘stabilizing treatment,’ HHS is attempting to radically expand exceptions to Pro-Life laws far beyond just life-threatening emergencies.”

Late last month, pro-life Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration. Paxton  said in his lawsuit

This latest unlawful action by the Biden Administration comes in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade and the subsequent triggering of Texas’s abortion ban. By this move, the Biden Administration seeks to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic. EMTALA does not authorize and has never been thought to authorize the federal government to require emergency healthcare providers to perform abortions. 

“This administration has a hard time following the law, and now they are trying to have their appointed bureaucrats mandate that hospitals and emergency medicine physicians perform abortions,” Attorney General Paxton said. “I will ensure that President Biden will be forced to comply with the Supreme Court’s important decision concerning abortion and I will not allow him to undermine and distort existing laws to fit his administration’s unlawful agenda.” 

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