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At issue is how to interpret a federal law barring hospitals from turning away poor or uninsured patients.
June 3, 2025Updated 7:21 p.m. ET
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it had revoked a Biden administration requirement that hospitals provide emergency abortions to women whose health is in peril, including in states where abortion is restricted or banned.
The move by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a branch of the department led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was not a surprise. But it added to growing confusion around emergency care and abortions since June 2022, when the Supreme Court rescinded the national right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade.
“It basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril,” Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert at Georgetown University, said of the Trump administration’s move.
The administration did not explicitly tell hospitals that they were free to turn away women seeking abortions in medical emergencies. Its policy statement said hospitals would still be subject to a federal law requiring them to provide reproductive health care in emergency situations. But it did not explain exactly what that meant.
Mr. Gostin and other experts said the murky policy could have dire consequences for pregnant women by discouraging doctors from performing emergency abortions in states where abortions are banned or restricted.
“We’ve already seen since the overturn of Roe that uncertainty and confusion tends to mean physicians are unwilling to intervene, and the more unwilling physicians are to intervene, the more risk there is in pregnancy,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California-Davis and a historian of the American abortion debate.
