Oct. 8 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court allowed a court order to stand, blocking the Biden administration from enforcing policy in Texas that mandates hospitals and doctors to perform emergency abortions or lose federal funding.
The justices issued their decision Monday without explanation, rejecting a Department of Justice request that they take up the case.
“This is a major victory at SCOTUS that will protect Texas medical providers from being forced to violate State law,” Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, said in a statement.
“No Texas doctor should be forced to violate his or her conscience or the law just to do their job.”
The decision, while a victory for the Republican attorney general and anti-abortion conservatives, is a defeat for the Biden administraiton, which has fought to install protections for access to the medical procedure after the conservative-leaning Supreme Court revoked them in June 2022 with its overturning of the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling.
One of the measures it sought to protect abortions with was new guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services in July of 2022, directing hospitals and doctors under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to perform an abortion on a patient experiencing an emergency medical condition if it was necessary “stabilizing treatment.” Those that refused could lose federal funding.
Texas — which banned nearly all abortions after six weeks’ gestation under threat of criminal prosecution — responded by suing the Biden administration, securing a lower court order enjoining the guidance’s interpretation of the EMTALA on the grounds that the act does not “provide an unequal right for the pregnant mother to abort her child.”
That decision was then upheld in January by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which forced the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.
The Monday decision comes a month before the general election and the end of a heated and close presidential election cycle, in which Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, has made abortion a central issue her campaign, attacking former President Donald Trump with it at seemingly every opportunity.
She has lambasted abortion prohibitions put in place following the 2022 Supreme Court decision as “Trump Abortion Bans,” crediting him for placing three ultra-conservative, anti-abortion judges on the high court during his term.
On Monday night, she repeated her attack on X, calling Trump “the architect of this healthcare crisis.”
“I will never stop fighting for a woman’s right to emergency medical care — and to restore the protections of Roe vs. Wade so that women in every state have access to the care they need,” she said.
