U.S. Government Cancels Critical Rule Mandating Emergency Abortion Care
(MENAFN) The U.S. government announced Tuesday it has rescinded a Biden-era rule that mandated hospitals provide emergency abortions for pregnant women facing critical health risks—even in states enforcing abortion bans or tight restrictions.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), under the Department of Health and Human Services, declared that the policy no longer aligns with directives from the Trump administration.
This policy rollback follows the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, removing federal safeguards for abortion rights.
After Roe’s reversal, the Biden administration had leaned on the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires federally funded hospitals to stabilize or treat emergency patients, to justify access to urgent abortion care.
While EMTALA does not explicitly reference abortion, administrations since George W. Bush have interpreted it to cover emergency abortions when necessary to protect a patient’s health or life.
Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert and Georgetown University professor, told a media outlet the Trump administration’s move “basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril.”
Although the Trump-era policy stopped short of expressly permitting hospitals to deny emergency abortions, it maintained that hospitals are bound by federal emergency care laws without clarifying if abortion access remains included.
Experts like Gostin warn that this lack of clarity may deter physicians from performing emergency abortions in restrictive states, putting pregnant women’s health at greater risk.
Since Roe’s fall, “uncertainty and confusion” have caused doctors to hesitate, and “the more unwilling physicians are to intervene, the more risk there is in pregnancy,” said Mary Ziegler, a historian of the American abortion debate and professor at the University of California-Davis.
“This is not just withdrawing what the Biden administration did,” she added, “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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