The Biden administration’s “new guidance” to hospitals declaring that abortions must be provided in emergencies seeks not to clarify the law but to provide pro-abortion forces a way to skirt state law while pushing several lies to further the false narrative that overturning Roe v. Wade endangers women’s lives.

In a Monday press release, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that through its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it had issued what it called “clarifying guidance on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act” on “abortion services in emergency situations.”

Congress passed the Emergency Act in 1986 “to ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay,” by imposing “specific obligations on Medicare-participating hospitals that offer emergency services.” Specifically, under the act, a medical facility that runs an emergency room — which is not all health care facilities — must “provide a medical screening examination when a request is made for examination or treatment for an emergency medical condition, including active labor, regardless of an individual’s ability to pay.” The law then requires hospitals “to provide stabilizing treatment for patients with such conditions,” with a hospital that “is unable to stabilize a patient within its capability” arranging a transfer to another facility.

The press release issued on Monday announced that HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra had written to health care providers in conjunction with the center’s issuances of a new memorandum purporting to explain the mandates of Emergency Act “in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization….”

Becerra declared that “when a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the life and health of the pregnant person — or draws the exception more narrowly than Emergency Act’s  emergency medical condition definition — that state law is preempted” (Emphasis added).

Donna Harrison, an OB/GYN and the CEO for the Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told The Federalist, “[We are] concerned that by using the ambiguous word ‘health’ that the Biden administration is trying to use Emergency Act to force the performance of abortions in situations which are not medical emergencies….”

The above comes from a July 13 story in The Federalist.