HHS Rescinds Biden-Era Emergency Abortion Policy for Hospitals

The Trump administration will no longer enforce Biden-era guidance that reminded hospitals and medical professionals of their obligation to provide emergency abortion care.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on Tuesday announced the agency is rescinding July 2022 guidance informing hospitals of their obligations under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). The law requires all qualified medical professionals to provide stabilizing treatment to any patient who shows up at an emergency department for a serious medical condition.

The 2022 guidance informed providers that a failure to provide stabilizing treatment, including abortions, to pregnant patients suffering a medical emergency would run afoul of the law.

“CMS will continue to enforce EMTALA, which protects all individuals who present to a hospital emergency department seeking examination or treatment, including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy,” the agency said in a press release Tuesday. “CMS will work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.”

The policy was subject to a number of legal challenges over its statutory authority, and its enforcement had been blocked in Texas.

Also Tuesday, the Catholic Medical Association took steps to voluntarily dismiss its challenge to the interpretation. The group of Catholic doctors had sued to block the guidance over concerns that it was issued without proper notice and comment rulemaking procedures.

The Biden-era guidance—and the litigation surrounding it—followed the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

The 2024 election prompted expectations that the new Trump administration would withdraw its support of the guidance, as well as other abortion-related protections that had been a focus of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Health advocates like Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, say those fears have now materialized.

She warned in a statement that the CMS’s move to rescind the guidance “will put lives at risk,” and “add to the fear, confusion, and dangerous delays patients and providers have faced since the fall of Roe v. Wade.”

The conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which has been involved in several suits challenging the guidance, welcomed the news, saying in a statement that its rescission “affirmed the plain words of the statute: EMTALA protects both the ‘pregnant woman’ and the ‘unborn child.’”

The Catholic Medical Association also applauded the decision.

“Emergency medicine physicians and others who treat pregnant women in crisis should not be forced to end an unborn life by governmental mandate,” Michelle Stanford, the group’s president, said in a statement. “Now they will be able to do what physicians are called to do: help all persons under their care, including the unborn.”