Texas (United States) filed a complaint on Thursday against a directive from Joe Biden’s government which authorizes emergency doctors to perform abortions in the event of danger to the life of the pregnant woman. And this, even if local laws ban abortions.
The complaint, filed by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, accuses the Democratic president of “flouting” the Supreme Court’s judgment of June 24, 2022, which gave freedom to each state to ban abortions on its soil. His government is “trying to use federal law to turn every emergency department in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic,” according to this document.
An “extreme and radical elected Republican”
The White House quickly criticized the action of an “extreme and radical elected Republican”. “It is inconceivable that a public official would take legal action to prevent women from receiving life-saving emergency care, a right protected by American law,” Karine Jean-Pierre, spokeswoman for the agency, said in a statement. Joe Biden. The Texas complaint comes in the wake of a letter Monday from Health Minister Xavier Becerra to emergency physicians practicing in federally funded hospitals.
Federal law “protects your clinical judgment and the actions you take to stabilize your pregnant patients, regardless of any restrictions in place in the state where you practice,” he wrote. If a doctor thinks an abortion is necessary to solve a medical emergency, “he must perform it”, adds the minister. Federal law “preempts” state laws if they prohibit abortions without exception for the life or health of the pregnant woman, he still assures.
A great legal vagueness
Joe Biden’s government “is trying to get its bureaucrats to force hospitals and emergency physicians to perform abortions,” criticized Ken Paxton, whose state now bans all abortions. Its laws, however, provide for an exception to save the lives of pregnant women and the complaint filed on Thursday seems above all political. It is part of a great legal vagueness since the Supreme Court dynamited the right to abortion in force for nearly half a century in the United States.
His decision has in fact made it possible to activate many laws that have remained dormant for years, including century-old laws, but whose provisions can be contradictory. For the moment, a dozen states, in the South and the conservative Center, prohibit abortions and a handful of others limit them to the first six weeks of pregnancy. Eventually, half of them should ban abortions on their soil.
