Trump Rescinds Biden Policy Requiring Hospitals to Provide Emergency Abortions

The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it had revoked a Biden administration requirement that hospitals provide emergency abortions to women whose health is in peril, including in states where abortion is restricted or banned.

The move by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a branch of the department led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was not a surprise. But it added to growing confusion around emergency care and abortions since June 2022, when the Supreme Court rescinded the national right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade.

“It basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril,” Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert at Georgetown University, said of the Trump administration’s move.

The administration did not explicitly tell hospitals that they were free to turn away women seeking abortions in medical emergencies. Its policy statement said hospitals would still be subject to a federal law requiring them to provide reproductive health care in emergency situations. But it did not explain exactly what that meant.

Mr. Gostin and other experts said the murky policy could have dire consequences for pregnant women by discouraging doctors from performing emergency abortions in states where abortions are banned or restricted.

“We’ve already seen since the overturn of Roe that uncertainty and confusion tends to mean physicians are unwilling to intervene, and the more unwilling physicians are to intervene, the more risk there is in pregnancy,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California-Davis and a historian of the American abortion debate.

“This is not just withdrawing what the Biden administration did,” she said. “It’s creating a lot of unanswered questions about what hospitals are supposed to do going forward. So more confusion means more risk.”

Abortion opponents were pleased. “President Trump promised to dismantle the abortion radicalism left by his predecessor, and today another abortion mandate bites the dust,” said Roger Severino, the vice president for domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who served in the first Trump administration.

At issue is how the government should interpret the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, a 1986 law aimed at discouraging hospitals from turning away patients who lack insurance or cannot afford care. The law requires hospitals that receive federal funding to treat or stabilize emergency patients, or transfer them to a facility that can provide care.

The law does not specifically include abortion, but Mr. Gostin said administrations going back to President George W. Bush have interpreted it that way. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the Biden administration reminded hospitals that the law obligated them to provide abortions in cases where they were medically necessary.

In a statement announcing the revocation of that policy, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it would “work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.”

The Biden policy resulted in lawsuits; the Biden administration sued Idaho, and Texas sued the administration. Both states asserted that their laws restricting abortion superseded the emergency medical act. Idaho has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, offering an exception only when the life — not the health — of the mother is at risk.

The Idaho case made its way to the Supreme Court last year. But the court ultimately decided that it had taken the case in error and dismissed it, leaving intact a lower-court ruling that allowed women in the state to receive abortions when their health was at risk.