Shanae Smith-Cunningham arrived at Memorial Regional Hospital on Dec. 21, 2022 — five days after her water broke, only halfway through her pregnancy. Despite her pleas for treatment and the risks to her health, staff at the Hollywood, Fla., hospital turned her away amid the state’s new abortion restrictions.
The decision to send Smith-Cunningham home put her life in peril, health officials later determined
The issue here is mainly that two laws conflict: one, a complete abortion ban at the state level. Two, a federal law, EMTALA, that requires Emergency Departments assess and stabilize any patient that comes in. EMTALA has a few other requirements, like not asking about payment until after treatment and preventing unnecessary discharges or transfers. This is the law that makes it so that uninsured people go to the ED/ER when they are sick, since regular docs can deny you for not being able to pay.
The key part of EMTALA here is that assessing and stabilizing a patient. If someone comes in during a crisis and the only way to stabilize them is to terminate the pregnancy, that is at odds with Idaho’s abortion ban. Basically, SCOTUS now has to say whether saving the mother is important enough to warrant terminating the pregnancy.
Hard to have a pregnancy without a live mother.
I guess I should also clarify that the question includes: does EMTALA mandate an abortion in that circumstance? It requires stabilizing the patient.
Eh… they’re more like guidelines. I would defer to the doctor on the ground rather than try to legislate.
Yeah but in this case the doctors on the ground are at legal risk for performing an abortion and therefore don’t risk it even if they think it’s necessary, but a federal mandate will protect them. That’s actually kind of the point here.
It’s bigger than that, it cracks EMTALA entirely if a state can overrule it by a policy.