The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case appealed by the Biden administration after a lower court sided with the pro-life plaintiffs, protecting Texas emergency room doctors from being forced to perform abortions.
The Supreme Court included the denial to hear the case, State of Texas v. Becerra, in an October 7 order list.
“We are pleased that the Supreme Court decided the 5th Circuit’s ruling should stand, allowing emergency rooms to fulfill their primary function — saving lives,” Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Senior Counsel Matt Bowman said in a press release. ADF represented several of the plaintiffs in the case.
“Hospitals — especially emergency rooms — are tasked with preserving life,” Bowman stated. “For this reason, the 5th Circuit correctly ruled that federal bureaucrats have no business compelling doctors or hospitals to end unborn lives.”
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In June 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) issued a pro-abortion mandate through a reinterpretation of the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), according to a previous CatholicVote report.
The EMTALA was originally intended to require “emergency rooms at hospitals participating in Medicare… to perform medical screening examinations on all individuals if they request it,” CatholicVote reported.
In July of the same year, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Christian Medical and Dental Association joined the State of Texas in a complaint against HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, requesting a preliminary injunction.
In August 2022, the Court for the Northern District of Texas granted a preliminary injunction protecting emergency room doctors from being forced to perform abortions and later made it permanent in December 2022. In January 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling, according to an ADF press release at the time.
In light of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the 5th Circuit ruling, Bowman also said, “Doctors shouldn’t be forced to break the Hippocratic Oath, and they shouldn’t have to choose between violating their deeply held beliefs or facing stiff financial penalties and being barred from the Medicare program.”
He noted that emergency room doctors provide necessary medical care to save the life of pregnant mothers, such as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy.
“But elective abortion is not life-saving care — it ends the life of the unborn child — and the government has no authority to force doctors to perform these dangerous procedures,” he said.
LifeNews Note: McKenna Snow writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
