Senate President Demands Answers From Emergency Services That Refused To Treat Pregnant Patients

WASHINGTON – Hospitals are facing questions about why they refuse to treat pregnant patients and whether state abortion bans have influenced how they treat such patients.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, sent requests for information to nine hospitals ahead of a hearing Tuesday on whether the abortion ban has prevented or delayed pregnant women from getting help during miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or other medical emergencies.

It’s part of a Democratic effort to focus national attention on the stories of women who have faced horrific realities since some states toughened a patchwork of abortion laws. Those strict laws are sowing chaos and hesitancy in emergency rooms, Wyden said at Tuesday’s hearing.

“Some states that have passed laws banning abortion claim they have exceptions if a woman’s life is in danger,” Wyden said. “In reality, those exceptions force doctors to play lawyers. And lawyers to play doctors. Health care providers are forced to make impossible decisions between providing critical care or facing prison time.”

Republicans criticized the hearing Tuesday, flatly denying that abortion laws have any impact on women’s health care in the United States and calling it a politically motivated attack just weeks before the presidential election. Republicans, clearly nervous about the impact of new abortion laws on the presidential race, repeatedly complained about the hearing’s title, “How Trump Criminalized Women’s Health Care.”

“Unfortunately, as the overtly partisan nature of the title demonstrates, it appears that the purpose of today’s hearing is to score political points against the former president,” said Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, a Republican.

A federal law requires emergency departments to provide stabilizing care to patients, a requirement that the Biden administration has said includes abortions necessary to save a woman’s health or life. But abortion advocates have argued that the law also requires hospitals to stabilize fetuses. The Senate Finance Committee comes into play because it oversees Medicare funding, which can be stripped if a hospital violates federal law.

The Associated Press reported that more than 100 women have been turned away from emergency room care across the country since 2022. Women have been turned away in states with and without strict abortion bans, but doctors in Florida and Missouri, for example, have explained that in some cases, they can’t give patients the treatment they need because of those states’ abortion bans. Wyden sent letters to four of the hospitals included in the AP reports, as well as a hospital at the center of a ProPublica report that found a Georgia woman died after doctors delayed her treatment.

Several Republicans say reports that women are being denied access to abortions are the result of misinformation or a misunderstanding of abortion laws.

Obstetrician-gynecologist Amelia Huntsberger told the committee that she became familiar with Idaho’s abortion law, which initially allowed abortions only if a woman was at risk of dying, when it went into effect in 2022. So did her husband, an emergency room physician. A year ago, they packed up and moved their family to Oregon.

“It was clear that it was inevitable that if we stayed in Idaho, at some point there would be a conflict between what a patient needed and what the laws would allow,” Huntsberger said.

Huntsberger is not alone. Idaho has lost nearly 50 ob-gyns since the state’s abortion ban was put in place.