Trump did not outlaw emergency abortion

The Trump administration’s reversal of a Biden-era policy regarding hospitals being required to perform emergency abortions has abortion activists up in arms — despite there actually being no threat to pregnant women who need emergency care.

“You have probably seen headlines going around, especially on Instagram, saying that Trump is now letting hospitals allow women to die, women who need these life-saving abortions we hear are now going to bleed out and die because of Trump’s draconian and cruel anti-abortion policies,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says on “Relatable.”

“It is almost always the case when it comes to pro-abortion propaganda that the story that you are reading, that those little pro-abortion influencers and accounts are pushing, that it’s just not true,” she continues.

The policy in question is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act that was passed in 1986 and requires hospitals to provide necessary emergency care, including for pregnant women, to stabilize serious medical conditions.

The law’s initial intent was to ensure patient access to emergency medical care and to prevent the practice of “patient dumping,” which is when patients are transferred from private to public hospitals without considering their medical condition or stability for transfers.

The Biden administration issued a guidance on this law in 2022 that interpreted EMTALA as requiring hospitals to perform abortions in emergency rooms, even in states with pro-life laws.

“So you can see, if you’re familiar at all with how the left interprets these kind of health care laws, you can see the problem right away, because how the left interprets the health or life of the mother or the stability of the mother, is not that the woman’s life actually has to be at risk,” Stuckey explains.

“They refer to a Supreme Court case called Doe vs. Bolton, where health and life of the mother is defined as not only the physical health of the mother, but the mental health of the mother, the financial situation of the mother, the familial circumstances of the mother,” she continues.

“So it was actually the Biden administration that was infringing upon people’s rights here, it’s not the Trump administration,” she adds.

The Trump administration rescinded this 2022 guidance in a statement arguing it wrongly turned emergency rooms into abortion clinics by forcing doctors to perform elective abortions.

“Which is true, because a woman could come in and say, ‘I have to have an abortion, I don’t feel stable, or I’m not feeling good or whatever,’ and instead of a doctor saying, ‘We can help you in different ways,’ or ‘Here’s where you need to go, let me give you other resources,’ they would be required by the Biden administration to perform an abortion,” Stuckey explains.

“So the Trump administration’s policy clarifies that EMTALA does not mandate abortions beyond what is necessary for emergency care, aligning with the law’s intent to protect both the mother and the unborn child,” she adds.

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