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How The Trump Administration is Undermining Abortion Access and Abandoning Pregnant People in Crisis
We knew the anti-abortion movement wouldn’t stop at overturning Roe. We knew they wouldn’t stop at banning abortion with “exceptions” for health and life. We knew they wouldn’t stop until they banned abortion for everyone, everywhere, and under every circumstance. We knew their end game, but I never imagined how fast they would move to reach it.
Less than three years after the Supreme Court unjustly overturned Roe v. Wade, abandoning 50 years of precedent and stripping the American people of constitutional protection of a right that is fundamental to the very core of our democracy, the self-described “most pro-life president in American history” has now abandoned the fight to ensure that people who need abortion care to save their lives, health, or future fertility can get it.
Last week, the Trump administration agreed to dismiss the case of United States v. Idaho. This case was filed by the Biden administration in 2022, and it sought to ensure that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, would continue to protect a person’s right to emergency abortion care even in states with extreme abortion bans like Idaho.
The consequences of these extreme abortion bans and the urgent need for clarity around the protections of EMTALA in states with those bans have become crystal clear over the past two-and-a-half years. A pregnant person was denied emergency abortion care at two different hospitals in Kansas and Missouri after her water broke at 18 weeks of pregnancy, putting her at risk of a serious infection, hemorrhaging, or death. Another pregnant person lost a fallopian tube and most of an ovary after a hospital in Texas sent her home without treating her ectopic pregnancy. Pregnant patients are being air-lifted out of Idaho in order to receive the care they need. Stories like these are now all too common and tragic and preventable deaths are becoming a part of American life.
EMTALA is a 40-year-old federal law that Congress passed in response to a troubling trend of hospitals turning away patients in dire situations. The law requires federally-funded hospitals to provide stabilizing care to anyone who is experiencing a medical emergency. There is no exception to the law for abortion care. In states like Idaho, where extreme abortion bans have made pregnancy an increasingly dangerous condition, EMTALA should serve as a back-stop to ensure that people’s lives aren’t put at risk, that people aren’t forced to suffer unnecessarily, and that people don’t have to reach the brink of death to receive the abortion care that they need. Yet President Trump, who claimed repeatedly on the campaign trail last year that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights,” is now allowing Idaho to enforce its abortion ban even in cases where a pregnant person’s health or life are at risk.
Fortunately, St. Luke’s Health System, the largest health care provider in Idaho, has filed its own lawsuit, because Idaho’s abortion ban has put its providers in the untenable situation of choosing between risking criminal prosecution and withholding the care they know is necessary. St. Luke’s filed the case in January of this year, no doubt anticipating that the new administration might stop enforcing EMTALA in Idaho. Last Tuesday, having been notified that the Trump administration is indeed abandoning its case, St. Luke’s filed a motion for a temporary restraining order seeking to prevent the state of Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban in cases where EMTALA requires emergency abortion care. Later that night, the motion was granted.
The good news is that, for the time being, Idaho cannot enforce its cruel abortion ban that could criminalize doctors who provide care to people in medical emergencies. The bad news is that this case is far from over. Within the next year or two, it will almost certainly make its way to the Supreme Court, where the justices seem split on whether to uphold EMTALA’s clear mandate or allow states to treat abortion like something other than the essential health care that it is.
In the meantime, the constantly shifting landscape of abortion bans across the country will continue to cause chaos, confusion, and fear for patients and providers nationwide. People will continue to suffer, and some will die, because of how extreme these bans are. People will be forced to travel across state lines to receive care, if they’re able to receive care at all. Doctors will flee the states with extreme bans because of how fraught their work has become under them. The maternal mortality crisis in this country will continue to worsen. And the anti-abortion movement will continue to march on towards its goal.
But so will we. We will not stop fighting until everyone has access to the care they seek, regardless of who they are or where they live.
