Thursday, June 5, 2025 - The Trump administration on Tuesday, June 3, revoked a Biden-era requirement that compelled emergency room doctors to perform abortions for women whose health is in peril, including in states where abortion is restricted or banned.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a
branch of the Department of Health and Human Services led by Health Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced on June 3 that it would rescind the
July 2022 guidelines issued under the Emergency Medical Treatment and
Active Labor Act (EMTALA).
That law, originally passed in 1986, was designed to
prevent “patient dumping” by requiring Medicare-participating hospitals to
provide stabilizing treatment to patients who can’t pay for treatment rather
than transferring them.
The Biden administration expanded the requirements
in the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, requiring hospitals to perform
abortions as “stabilizing treatment” in emergency situations.
The government will “continue to enforce” EMTALA “including
for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant
woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy,” CMS said this week.
In its announcement, the government noted that it “will
work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the
former administration’s actions.”
The move by the CMS to rescind the Biden-era requirement was
not a surprise. But it added to growing confusion around emergency care and
abortions since the Supreme Court rescinded the national right to abortion by
overturning Roe v. Wade.
“It basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red
states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril,” Lawrence O. Gostin, a
health law expert at Georgetown University, said of the Trump administration’s
move.
The administration did not explicitly tell hospitals that
they were free to turn away women seeking abortions in medical emergencies.
Its policy statement said hospitals would still be subject to a
federal law requiring them to provide reproductive health care in emergency
situations. But it did not explain exactly what that meant.
Mr. Gostin and other experts said the murky policy could
have dire consequences for pregnant women by discouraging doctors from
performing emergency abortions in states where abortions are banned or
restricted.
“We’ve already seen since the overturn of Roe that
uncertainty and confusion tends to mean physicians are unwilling to intervene,
and the more unwilling physicians are to intervene, the more risk there is in
pregnancy,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of
California-Davis and a historian of the American abortion debate.
“This is not just withdrawing what the Biden administration did,” she said.
“It’s creating a lot of unanswered questions about what hospitals are supposed
to do going forward. So more confusion means more risk.”
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