Breaking: White House Rescinds Federal Guidance on Emergency Abortions

They're telling us who they are. Again.

Jun 04, 2025

I just left a play with my husband when I saw the news: the Trump administration has rescinded federal guidance requiring hospitals to provide patients with emergency abortions.

To put it plainly: The White House is telling Republican-led states that they can let women die.

I wish this were hyperbole. I wish I didn’t have to write you yet another email detailing yet another way that this administration has made clear they don’t see us as people. I hate being the messenger of our dehumanization.

And part of me would love to soften the blow—truly. But at a time when anti-abortion lawmakers and activists are working overtime to massage reality, candor is more important than comfort.

Because here’s what’s going to happen: They are going to say that we’re fear-mongering. That women can get life-saving care even in states with abortion bans. They’ll say it even as maternal mortality spikes and stories of women’s deaths go public. They’ll repeat that lie as mothers beg someone to care that their daughters are dead. They’ll even have the nerve to blame us—saying that the abortion rights movement is scaring doctors out of doing their jobs.

That level of disinformation and gaslighting necessitates being clear-eyed. So here’s what you need to know:

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) is a federal law that requires hospital emergency rooms to provide patients with life-saving and stabilizing care, including abortions.

After the end of Roe, the Biden administration made clear that hospitals were required to adhere to EMTALA regardless of state abortion bans. In other words: refusing women emergency life-saving or stabilizing abortion care would be against federal law.

Conservative organizations and Republican-led states were furious, and have been fighting to free themselves of that requirement ever since. They claim that EMTALA doesn’t apply to them, and that the law doesn’t require abortion care anyway.

Idaho’s EMTALA challenge made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where justices were treated to arguments over how many organs a woman can lose before a state is required to give her care.

Rather than take a substantive stand, SCOTUS chickened out—responding with a non-ruling that kicked the issue back to a lower court and left Idaho patients in limbo. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson laid into her conservative colleagues for just that:

“While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires. This Court had a chance to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation, and we have squandered it. And for as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho, Texas, and elsewhere will be paying the price.”

When Texas took the issue to court, however, the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit ruled explicitly in their favor. Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt wrote, “EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations.”

Setting aside Engelhardt’s obvious disdain for women who dare to want to live, consider what it means to require doctors to treat both a woman and a fertilized egg equally as patients. Consider that this is what they expect us to die for.

That’s the most important takeaway from today’s decision: The Trump administration isn’t just signaling that anti-abortion states can deny women care without consequence—they’re demanding that hospitals treat pregnant patients and their embryos, fetuses, or fertilized eggs as equal.

I’ll have more on that particular nod towards fetal personhood tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’d like to read more about EMTALA, emergency abortions, and Republicans’ total disregard for our lives and humanity, consider revisiting the Abortion, Every Day pieces below: