South Carolina providers push back against faith-based assaults on abortion care

by Emma Akpan
August 14, 2025

… In January 2025, five doctors sued the state of South Carolina against the 2023 Heartbeat Law, which prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, or after about nine weeks. Their lawsuit is particularly important, as the Heartbeat Law was instrumental in the state Supreme Court's decision to uphold the six-week abortion ban. For these doctors, not only is the decision devastating for patients, but exemplifies why anti-abortion advocates, lawmakers, and religious leaders should not be allowed to use their faith to implement a life-threatening law that doctors must unquestionably follow.

The plaintiffs have therefore inverted faith-based pro-life logic by counter-arguing the questions: Don't doctors who need to administer abortions get to use their faith to challenge such laws? And if the other side can claim conscientiousness to prohibit abortion, then why can't doctors claim conscientiousness to protect their right to perform abortions?

Continued: https://scalawagmagazine.org/2025/08/south-carolina-providers-push-back-against-faith-based-assaults-on-abortion-care/

USA – An Open Letter to Rep. Kat Cammack From a Medical Doctor: It’s Abortion Bans That Make Doctors Afraid to Act, Not ‘the Radical Left’

July 10, 2025
by Chloe Nazra Lee

I remember the day I heard about Dobbs. It was a summer morning during my final year of medical school. I’d awakened in the damp basement apartment I’d rented for a clinical rotation in Pittsburgh. As I scrolled through my news feed, my heart plummeted. There was a resigned and tacitly understood melancholy among the women in the hospital that day. A sisterhood predicated on shared despair was quietly forming during the upheaval of perceived judicial betrayal. Even those of us who barely knew each other might wearily exchange passing glances in the hallway, signaling, “Well, shit. Girl, I know. And it’ll only get worse.”

No woman may escape the cruelty of the nebulous and varying restrictions on reproductive healthcare in the post-Roe world—as Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) discovered in May 2024 when faced with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy shortly after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/rep-kat-cammack-medical-doctor-abortion-bans-that-doctors-afraid-act/

Trump rescinds guidance protecting women in need of emergency abortions

Abortion rights supporters say scaling back Biden officials’ Emtala guidance will endanger pregnant patients’ lives

Carter Sherman
Tue 3 Jun 2025

The Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded Biden-era guidance clarifying that hospitals in states with abortion bans cannot turn away pregnant patients who are in the midst of medical emergencies – a move that comes amid multiple red-state court battles over the guidance.

The guidance deals with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), which requires hospitals to stabilize patients facing medical emergencies. States such as Idaho and Texas have argued that the Biden administration’s guidance, which it issued in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, interpreted Emtala incorrectly.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/03/trump-admin-emergency-abortion-emtala

03.06.2025

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Donald Trump

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

EMTALA

Joe Biden

Ketanji Brown Jackson

United States

Anti-choice

Politics

Under Idaho’s abortion ban, a family confronts life-or-death reality — and a crisis of faith

As judges weigh the limits of medical exceptions, Idaho’s abortion ban is being tested — in courts, hospitals and patients’ lives

By Kelsey Turner
Apr 18, 2025

Desi Ballis didn’t understand why her doctor needed her to go to Utah.

She lay on an exam table in Boise, her pregnant belly wet with ultrasound gel. At 38, she’d done various genetic tests that confirmed her baby was developing normally. Its small features looked perfect on the screen.

But her baby wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Her 20-week ultrasound in February 2024 showed findings of hydrops fetalis, an often lethal condition where fluid builds up in the fetus’ body, according to Desi’s medical records. Her baby would almost certainly die before delivery. If she remained pregnant, Desi risked dying, too.

Continued: https://www.investigatewest.org/investigatewest-reports/under-idahos-abortion-ban-a-family-confronts-life-or-death-reality-and-a-crisis-of-faith-17865090

Trump administration drops lawsuit seeking to ensure abortion access in emergency rooms

By Tierney Sneed, CNN
Wed March 5, 2025

President Donald Trump’s administration took a major step Wednesday in support of states with sweeping abortion bans, dropping a Biden-era lawsuit against Idaho that sought to protect abortion access in medical emergencies.

The Biden administration had prevailed in early stages of the lawsuit challenging Idaho’s extremely strict abortion restrictions, with the Supreme Court last year leaving in place a temporary court order that allows Idaho hospitals to provide abortion when a pregnancy endangers a woman’s life or health.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/abortion-idaho-emergency-rooms-emtala-supreme-court/index.html

05.03.2025

News

Center for Reproductive Rights

emergency abortion

Emergency Medical And Labor Treatment Act

Make no mistake: this Trump presidency will continue to attack abortion rights

Just because Trump is publicly distancing himself from abortion does not mean Republicans won’t enact a national ban

Moira Donegan
Tue 12 Nov 2024

Abortion rights initiatives were on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and won in seven of them. One of the losers was prop 4, Florida’s abortion rights measure, which received a whopping 57% of the vote but failed to meet the state’s unusually high 60% threshold, meaning that the state’s six-week ban will remain in place. Asked about the Florida abortion rights proposition ahead of the election, Trump said that when he went to cast his ballot near Palm Beach, he would vote against it.

It has always been a little hard to believe that Donald Trump personally hates abortion, even if it is abundantly clear how little he thinks of women. Trump, after all, has claimed to have numerous conflicting positions on abortion rights throughout his life. And his brand of masculinity is boorish, vulgar, and above all, sexually entitled – far from the priggish, repressed moralism of more classical anti-abortion figures like Mike Pence.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/12/trump-presidency-abortion-restrictions

12.11.2024

Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act

A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms

It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana
Nov. 1, 2024

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-abortion-ban-emtala

If Trump wins the election, this is what’s at stake

Women and doctors describe heart-wrenching decisions under what may be the US’s strictest abortion ban in Idaho

Carter Sherman in Boise, Idaho
Mon 21 Oct 2024

When Jennifer Adkins and her husband were considering having a second child in Idaho, they vaguely thought how the state’s near-total abortion ban could affect them. But Adkins’ first pregnancy had gone so smoothly, she didn’t even use an epidural when she gave birth. Her next pregnancy, she expected, would be similar.

But in April 2023, 12 weeks into her second pregnancy, an ultrasound scan shattered that hope.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/21/idaho-abortion-trump

Inside the Supreme Court’s negotiations and compromise on Idaho’s abortion ban

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
Mon July 29, 2024

The Supreme Court began the year poised to build on its 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and to deliver a new blow to abortion access.

In January, the court took the extraordinary step of letting Idaho enforce its ban on abortion with an exception only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, despite an ongoing challenge from the Biden administration arguing that it intruded on federal protections for emergency room care.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/supreme-court-idaho-abortion-emtala-biskupic/index.html

USA – Why Smashing the Administrative State Is a Disaster for Reproductive Rights

The latest Supreme Court rulings are already being weaponized against gender identity. Abortion and birth control are next.

NINA MARTIN, Mother Jones
July 10, 2024

It turns out the most consequential reproductive rights case before the Supreme Court this past term—arguably, the most significant since the overturn of Roe v. Wade—wasn’t the religious right’s attack on the abortion drug mifepristone, or the battle over whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions in states with strict bans. It was a fight over who should pay to monitor commercial fishing boats so they don’t deplete the herring population off the Atlantic coast.

Reproductive health and gender equality advocates are just beginning to digest the sweeping implications of the ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, in which the court’s conservative supermajority overturned a 40-year-old cornerstone of US administrative law known as “Chevron deference.” In doing so, the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies to issue regulations on everything from financial markets to industrial pollution to drug pricing to workplace safety.

And abortion. And birth control. And trans equality. And pregnant workers’ rights.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/why-smashing-the-administrative-state-is-a-disaster-for-reproductive-rights/

10.07.2024