A federal judge in Texas has blocked a Biden administration guidance that required hospitals to provide emergency abortions, even in states like Texas, which prohibits the practice following the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.
The legal effort by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a stalwart Republican, represents the latest attempt to stop the federal government from influencing the reproductive access landscape in the aftermath of the supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned longstanding constitutional protections on abortion.
Such preventions on abortion access could have devastating financial and health consequences on women, especially Black, Latino and Indigenous women who already disproportionately suffer from deaths during childbirth.
The decision effectively left it to states to decide whether to protect abortion rights.
As a result, abortions bans have spread throughout Republican-led states like Idaho and Tennessee, even as abortion rights groups leverage the US courts to maintain reproductive health protections under state constitutions. In Kansas, voters approved a measure to protect abortion rights in the deeply conservative state’s constitution, striking a blow to the anti-abortion movement following the supreme court’s decision.
In his decision, Judge James Wesley Hendrix, who was appointed by Donald Trump, concluded that the US Department of Health and Human Services overreached in its guidance interpreting the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, a 1986 law that requires people receive emergency medical care regardless of their ability to pay.
Hendrix stopped short of blocking the guidance nationally, keeping the prohibition in Texas. The decision sets the stage for another anticipated ruling in a justice department lawsuit against a recent abortion ban in Idaho that involves the same federal law at the heart of the Texas case, Reuters reported. That ruling is expected on Wednesday.
“That guidance goes well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent as to abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict,” Hendrix wrote.
Hendrix’s decision came just one day before a so-called “trigger law” barring nearly all abortions went into effect on Wednesday. The law, passed by the Texas legislature in 2021, increases the criminal and civil penalties on those involved with abortions except the pregnant patient, the Texas Tribune reported. Since the Dobbs decision, clinics have stopped offering services, forcing people to travel to other states to seek out abortions.
