Joe Biden is Trying to Force Doctors to Do Abortions Even After Courts Rebuked Him

09.01.2024 20:55

LifeNews.com

Joe Biden is not giving up on his radical scheme attempting to force doctors to do abortions. Biden is trying to force emergency room doctors to kill babies in abortions in violation of their own conscience as a means of promoting and expanding abortions in pro-life states that protect unborn children. Even though a federal […]

The post Joe Biden is Trying to Force Doctors to Do Abortions Even After Courts Rebuked Him appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Even though a federal appeals court and the Supreme Court have rebuked his plan so far, Biden is pushing forward. As LifeNews reported, the Supreme Court has ruled that Joe Biden can’t force Idaho to turn its emergency rooms into abortion centers – for now while the case continues. The decision follows on a federal appeals court ruling this week stopping Biden from doing the same thing in Texas.

Today, his adminitratin published a new rule — as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published in the federal register the guidelines Biden wants that would potentially implement the pro-abortion policy.

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Bowman told LifeNews that Americans should oppose Biden’s extreme abortion agenda in part because it could force doctors and nurses to participate in aboritons against their religious or moral beliefs.

“Americans shouldn’t be forced to violate their ethical and religious beliefs. Yet, every year, countless medical practitioners needlessly suffer threats to their livelihoods and affronts to their faith just for asserting their rights to conscience and religious freedom,” Bowman said.

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“In its rule, HHS suggests it will continue its misguided use of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to require doctors to perform abortions even though that federal law has no abortion requirement, and conscience laws provide no exception allowing forced performance of abortion,” the pro-life attorney explained.

Bowman said federal law should instead protect the conscience rights of medical professionals.

“Patients are best served by medical practitioners who are free to act consistent with their oath to ‘do no harm.’ Doctors, nurses, and other medical providers should enjoy this same constitutional protection, free to live and work in a manner consistent with their faith,” he said.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Joe Biden can’t force Idaho to turn its emergency rooms into abortion centers – for now while the case continues. The nation’s highest court ruled that Joe Biden can’t exploit a federal law to try to weaken Idaho’s abortion ban by allowing emergency room doctors to do abortions.

Last year, the Justice Department filed suit Aug. 2 against the state of Idaho, hoping to undermine its new law prohibiting most abortions by claiming that the state law conflicts with EMTALA and medical treatment for pregnant women in emergency rooms.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit that challenges Idaho’s protective law — arguing that it would prevent supposedly medically necessary abortions. Despite false reports that abortion bans would prevent doctors from treating pregnant women for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, pro-life doctors confirm that is not the case. Some 35 states have laws making it clear that miscarriage is not abortion and every state with an abortion ban allows treatment for both.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill found that Idaho’s law conflicts with the federal law because it bans abortions in nearly all circumstances. But the state argued the any emergency abortion is allowed under its abortion ban omn elective abortions.

Now the nation’s highest court will hear the case in April and issue a full ruling deciding the case.

The case involves the Biden administration’s unlawful attempt to use a law that ensures indigent patients receive emergency room care to force doctors to perform abortions that are illegal under Idaho law.

Idaho’s pro-life law imposes penalties on physicians who perform prohibited abortions unless doing so is necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman or other exceptions apply. The federal government claims—and the lower court ruled—that EMTALA requires abortions in violation of this law if an emergency room doctor thinks it is appropriate.

“Hospitals—especially emergency rooms—are centers for preserving life. The government has no business transforming them into abortion clinics,” said ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley, vice president of the Center for Life and regulatory practice. “Emergency room physicians can, and do, treat ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions. But elective abortion is not life-saving care—it ends the life of the unborn child—and the government has no authority to override Idaho’s law barring these procedures. We urge the Supreme Court to halt the lower court’s injunction and allow Idaho emergency rooms to fulfill their primary function—saving lives.”

After the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion to the states in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the federal government sued the state of Idaho, claiming that EMTALA, an ancillary provision of the Medicare statute, preempts Idaho’s pro-life law. But as explained in the emergency application, “EMTALA is silent on abortion and actually requires stabilizing treatment for the unborn children of pregnant women.”

“The United States’ position conflicts with the universal agreement of federal courts of appeal that EMTALA does not dictate a federal standard of care or displace state medical standards. The district court accepted the United States’ revisionist, post-Dobbs reading of EMTALA and enjoined Idaho’s Defense of Life Act in emergency rooms. The district court’s injunction effectively turns EMTALA’s protection for the uninsured into a federal super-statute on the issue of abortion, one that strips Idaho of its sovereign interest in protecting innocent, human life and turns emergency rooms into a federal enclave where state standards of care do not apply,” Hawley notes.

Idaho’s abortion ban permits a physician who does an abortion to raise the affirmative defense that the abortion was necessary to save the mother’s life or that the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest that was reported. In both cases, the physician must choose a procedure that is most likely to save the life of the baby and protect the mother. The law explicitly excludes contraception from the definition of abortion, and women upon whom abortions are performed may not be prosecuted.

The pro-life laws in Idaho and other states include clearly defined exceptions that allow abortions in the cases when a mother’s life is at risk. Because the pro-life movement cares about the lives of both mother and child and there are rare cases in which only the mother’s life can be saved, it supports such exceptions.

But these exceptions mean the Biden administration’s guidance is unnecessary. Undermining Idaho’s life-saving efforts and expanding abortions appear to be the administration’s real goal.