Yesterday was the first day of the fall term for the U.S. Supreme Court, but already it is attacking reproductive rights — and women’s right to life.
The action to let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that supposedly violate Texas’ draconian abortion ban is proof that the so-called religiously motivated “pro-lifers” on the court are profoundly anti-women and anti-life — caring about life only from conception to birth.
The Supreme Court’s move keeps in place a lower court order that hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations “in violation” of Texas’ uncompromising ban. The Biden administration pointed out that under federal law, hospitals, even in states with abortion bans, must perform abortions necessary to preserve a pregnant patient’s health or life when at serious risk. Texas supposedly has an exception for the life of a woman. However, the state medical board won’t specify all the conditions, leading medical professionals to fear prosecution. Performing an abortion in Texas is a felony punishable by up to life in prison, with fines up to $100,000.
“It’s impossible to have the best interest of your patient in mind when you’re staring down a life sentence,” points out Beth Brinkmann, senior director of U.S. litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Texas officials have put doctors in an impossible situation. It is clear that these exceptions are a farce, and that these laws are putting countless lives in jeopardy.”
The Center in late summer filed complaints on behalf of two women against Texas hospitals that refused to treat ectopic pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies (which form outside the uterus) are by definition doomed. Because treatment was denied, the women lost their fallopian tubes and suffered harm to future fertility. One of them nearly bled to death. The complaints were filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act known as EMTALA, a law requiring hospitals to provide medical care that stabilizes patients. EMTALA is at the center of an ongoing case in Idaho, in which the Supreme Court earlier this year eventually punted, allowing EMTALA to prevail against a state ban while the case wends its way through the courts.
So far, litigation to preserve women’s health and lives when endangered by pregnancies has failed in Texas. The Texas Supreme Court, in late May, heartlessly ruled against a Center for Reproductive Rights case brought by 20 Texas women denied abortion care despite facing dangerous pregnancy complications.
Numerous investigative news stories have documented how many women in states with abortion bans have been turned away from needed care, “bringing them to the brink of death,” as ABC News has reported. Associated Press has documented that 100 pregnant women in medical distress have been turned away or received inappropriate treatment by emergency rooms since the Dobbs decision overturned federal abortion rights in 2022. ProPublica recently exposed the heartbreaking death of a young mother, who died after doctors in Georgia waited 20 hours before doing the D&C she needed.
Even in states with pro-choice laws, pregnant individuals can find they are considered expendable. Last week, the state of California courageously sued a Catholic hospital for denying an emergency abortion to a woman miscarrying twins at 15 weeks of pregnancy, endangering her life and now her fertility. The fact that the fetuses were dead or dying and could not survive does not make a dent in Catholic doctrine, which happily risks or sacrifices the woman’s life if a “fetal tone” is detectable. This happened to Dr. Savita Halappanavar, who died horribly and unnecessarily of blood poisoning in an Irish Catholic hospital in 2012 because a faint heartbeat was detectable in her dying fetus. Irish citizens cried “Never again” and responded by repealing much of Ireland’s ban. But in the United States, we continue to lose ground on abortion rights due to the influence of conservative Christian judges and legislators.
A new column by veteran Supreme Court observer Linda Greenhouse reveals the anti-abortion animus of President Trump-appointed judges. She writes about an order by a federal district judge in North Dakota last week who ruled in favor of the Catholic Diocese of Bismarck and a Catholic group challenging the Biden administration’s 2022 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
The act requires employers to grant reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth and “related medical conditions,” including abortion care and fertility treatments.
Requesting such accommodations would be a fireable offense because it violates the Catholic faith, insisted indignant Catholic plaintiffs. The judge agreed and ruled that requiring the Catholic groups to obey the law would be a violation of their religious free exercise rights. The judge complained that this is a “post-Christian age” and even compared the Catholic plaintiffs to Catholic martyr Thomas More. Greenhouse, who coined the phrase “grievance conservatism” to describe Justice Samuel Alito’s complaint that religious rights are being persecuted, warns: “I think the phrase is due for a refinement. What we are seeing now is grievance Christianity.”
There is nothing remotely “pro-life” about how pregnant individuals are being treated today in the supposedly secular United States of America by aggrieved Christians intent on forcing their anti-life dogma on the rest of us — no matter how many women may suffer and die as a result.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members across the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
