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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Which federal law are you referring to? EMTALA does not supersede state law, nor does it prevent the state from pursuing criminal charges for abortion.
It's unrealistic to expect a significant number of doctors to throw away their livelihoods and go to prison to prove a legal threat. Doctors are being advised by risk management divisions of the hospital to not even consider abortions in these cases (in certain states) because it means saying goodbye to your practice, your savings, and your family.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/02/texas-abortion-fifth-circuit/
EMTALA supercedes state law because it is federal law. This is standard legal doctrine.
Nobody has been prosecuted for performing an abortion since the Dobbs decision. Hundreds of abortions have happened in Missouri since Dobbs, and nobody has been prosecuted there.
There's literally less legal danger in performing an emergency abortion/premature delivery in a ban state than in shoplifting $500 of merchandise in San Francisco. The doctors who have done the post-Dobbs abortions have clearly done the calculus and found this to be the case. Nobody has been or needs to be "sacrificed."
Texas disagrees. Please see above source.
No one's going to risk their livelihood on precedent. While legal precedent is important, it doesn't provide meaningful reassurance when the stakes are this high.
Do you have any specific examples of such cases?
Texas abortion law protects emergency abortions. The lawsuit was about an expansion of the definition of "emergency" justified by EMTALA. From the decision, quoted from the article:
Nobody is risking their livelihood by performing abortions because there is no legal risk for performing them in emergencies. How many prosecutions of emergency abortions since Dobbs - not threats of prosecution, because those have no teeth - can you find? Or any prosecutions at all? And here is my source for the hundreds of abortions figure.
EMTALA does not apply once the patient has been admitted to the hospital. It applies to ER care only.
There is no medicolegal standard for "life-threatening" That determination is, to a degree, subjective.
In many cases, a patient will come to the ER in a non life threatening clinical state and get sicker following admission. EMTALA no longer applies to these patients.
If, in retrospect, a doctor performs an abortion and its decided that the mother's life was not at risk, they face a felony charge.
Per the Texas Supreme Court, exceptions apply only when death or serious physical impairment is imminent (which is probably too late to save the patient and have a good functional outcome, unfortunately)
The problem here is legislation. There is no medical error. Practitioners are making a risk-benefit assessment and choosing not to martyr themselves.
I feel that you're not familiar with medical practice and are oversimplifying a very complex issue.
Your entire argument is founded on paranoid conjecture.
She was admitted to the hospital ER, kept overnight, and released without treatment. She was at risk of severe injury or death if she didn't receive appropriate treatment. Per the HHS secretary, "While many state laws have recently changed, it’s important to know that the federal EMTALA requirements have not changed, and continue to require that healthcare professionals offer treatment, including abortion care, that the provider reasonably determines is necessary to stabilize the patient’s emergency medical condition." Therefore, the hospitals are liable for not providing essential care.
"Life-threatening" is somewhat subjective, and doctors can be charged for providing non-emergency abortions. However, no doctors have been charged post-Dobbs with providing any abortions at all, therefore there is no meaningful risk of prosecution in emergency cases. If I was a doctor in such a situation, I wouldn't hesitate to provide the necessary care if I believed there was an emergency.
Nobody has been charged in post-Dobbs Texas for providing emergency abortions, or any at all. The law is working as intended.
The medical error is in believing that the law restricts doctors from performing life-and-limb-saving procedures. That leads to negligence, as in this case.
I'm going to leave it at this: Doctors and lawyers know more about this than you or I do and it borders on conspiracy peddling to think that not saving a life is being done through simple negligence here.
That particular case needs to be fleshed out in court and may well be an anomaly but there's a reason she is not the only one and the source of that is in the legislature.
Yes, which is why multiple doctors and lawyers have given the okay to provide pre-birth medical procedures. There's no tangible legal threat involved. She may never have her health back, but I hope the hospital is held responsible for what happened.