The Catholic Medical Association sued Biden’s health agencies on Friday for telling doctors that they must commit abortions in the ER if deemed ‘necessary.’
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) -- A group of about 2,500 Catholic doctors and health care providers sued the Biden administration on Friday for attempting to force emergency room physicians to kill innocent life through abortion in certain circumstances after the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is representing the Catholic Medical Association and challenging Biden administration’s “mandate” in question, issued by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, for violating religious freedom protections of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and overstepping executive authority.
The lawsuit notes that a memo issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services following the Dobbs v. Jackson decision essentially creates out of thin air a requirement to commit abortion if it is “the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve (an emergency medical condition),” though abortion is never medically necessary or justifiable and therefore cannot be a "treatment."
The Biden HHS memo cites the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires ER doctors to stabilize patients in emergency medical conditions, despite the fact that EMTALA does not mention abortion and, in fact, according to the lawsuit, “requires stabilizing the ‘unborn child.’”
The memo goes so far as to claim that EMTALA grants the Biden administration “authority to override state pro-life laws,” LifeNews reported.
ADF senior counsel Matt Bowman highlighted the fact that this attempt to force ER abortions contradicts the core responsibility of doctors – to seek to “preserv(e) life.”
“Federal bureaucrats have no business compelling doctors or hospitals to end unborn lives, especially when the law they are citing grants them no such authority,” Bowman said in a statement shared in an ADF press release.
He pointed out that ER doctors already have the ability to treat life-threatening conditions of pregnant mothers, such as ectopic pregnancies.
Even abortionists admit that the idea of a so-called “medically necessary” abortion to save the life of a mother is a fiction. “We hear all the time how abortion – including, especially late-term abortion – is necessary to save women’s lives. Nothing could be further from the truth,” abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino explained to Live Action founder and president Lila Rose in 2016.
He told how during the nine years that he worked at a health center that imported women with severe and life-threatening diseases during pregnancies, he saved “hundreds of women” by delivering their babies. “And I always tell people: In all of those years, the number of babies that I had to … deliberately kill in the process was zero. None,” Levatino continued.
He further explained that the “vast majority of life-threatening” conditions during pregnancy are late term, at which point it takes two to three days to prepare the cervix for an abortion, much longer than it takes to deliver the baby, and potentially even guaranteeing the mother’s death.
Asked why it is frequently claimed that abortions are at times “medically necessary” in order to save the life of the mother, Levatino pointed out that the ambiguous meaning of the word health can be so broadly interpreted as to render it meaningless. This has been exemplified by abortionist Leah Torres, who admitted in 2019 that, to her, not wanting to be pregnant anymore counts as a “medical reason” for a woman to undergo an abortion.
