Titles Matter (Except in Texas)
We began the New Year with the traditional toasts, noisemakers (to drive away evil spirits), pork dinners, and the Philadelphia Mummers Parade (for no apparent reason). Surely, 2024 would see an end to divisiveness and political gamesmanship.
Well, 2024 began on the wrong foot yesterday (and don’t call me Shirley).
A federal appeals court ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. EMTALA, passed in 1986 by a Republican Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan (Honor and Glory to his Holy Name) requires hospitals and physicians to treat emergency medical conditions or risk fines, civil lawsuits and being blacklisted from federal health programs. In other words, if a woman staggers into an E.R. hemorrhaging from a gynecological problem, the hospital cannot turn her away because she has no medical insurance and can’t pay cash.
Hope could it take until 1986 for Congress to figure out that this was a good idea?
The Biden administration cited EMTALA when it required Texas hospitals to perform emergency abortions. The 5th Circuit Appeals Court disagreed. Its decision stated that EMTALA “does not govern the practice of medicine” and that the nasty Biden people didn’t follow the proper procedure to override Texas’s anti-abortion law.
Yo, 5th Circuit! There it is in big letters on the title EMERGENCY MEDICAL TREATMENT. How can it not “govern the practice of medicine”? Titles generally cover content (except for The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” which really needed to be titled “Teenage Wasteland”).
Pro-Life Texans were thrilled. “The Court has delivered a big win for babies and mothers by halting a key piece of Biden’s pro-abortion agenda. The federal emergency-care law is no grounds for forcing doctors to carry out abortions even against their better medical judgment.”
JOE BIDEN IS FORCING TEXAS DOCTORS TO PERFORM ABORTIONS!!! That will make a great campaign ad on Fox News.
“Better medical judgment” might apply to a case in Florida where a woman lost half her blood before she could make it back to the emergency room after being turned away or a case in Texas where a woman was allowed to abort only after she became septic causing permanent physical damage.
So much for 2024 being free of partisanship.
By Ed Dufton
