This week, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent a letter doctor and hospital associations stating that they must perform “emergency abortions.”
According to the Associated Press, the letter was signed by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Chiquita Brooks-LaSure. A copy of the letter was obtained by the outlet.
“No pregnant woman or her family should have to even begin to worry that she could be denied the treatment she needs to stabilize her emergency medical condition in the emergency room,” the letter said.
“And yet, we have heard story after story describing the experiences of pregnant women presenting to hospital emergency departments with emergency medical conditions and being turned away because medical providers were uncertain about what treatment they were permitted to provide,” it added.
The letter came one week after the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case Moyle v. United States, consolidated with Idaho v. United States, which surrounds the issue of what the Biden administration touts as “emergency abortion care.”
As Townhall covered, the case decided whether a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requiring hospitals that participate in Medicaid or Medicare to provide “necessary stabilizing treatment” in an emergency, trumped an Idaho law that bans most abortions.
In its decision, the Supreme Court said it would require Idaho to provide abortions in situations that do not align with state law by reinstating an injunction on the state's pro-life law put in place by a lower court. This was considered a "win" for the Biden administration's aggressive pro-abortion agenda.
The concurring opinion was authored by Justice Elena Kagan, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
"Apparently, the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents. That is regrettable," Alito wrote. "EMTALA obligates Medicare-funded hospitals to treat, not abort, an 'unborn child.'"