How Close to Death Does a Person Have to Be to Qualify for an Abortion Ban Exemption? – By Madison Pauly (Mother Jones) / July 15, 2022
That’s the next legal fight brewing between states and the feds.
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It’s a foregone conclusion that the Democrats’ bill to restore abortion rights will fail in the Senate in the coming days, just as it failed in May and in February before that. The Women’s Health Protection Act, which guarantees the right to seek and provide an abortion before fetal viability, wouldn’t just undo the blanket abortion bans now taking effect across the country. Were it to become law, the Women’s Health Protection Act would, in fact, erase years of work by the “pro-life” movement’s symbiotic Republican state legislators.
That immense power comes from the constitutional principle of “preemption”: When federal and state laws conflict, federal laws win. Preemption is why no state can allow employers to pay less than $7.25 per hour, the federal minimum wage. And it’s the key to any Biden administration plan to fight state abortion restrictions.
On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services invoked the principle of preemption when it issued guidance putting hospitals on notice that they’d be violating a federal law, called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), if they declined to provide abortions to patients who needed them to resolve a medical emergency, like an ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage with severe complications.
CONTINUE > https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/pre-emption-preemption-roe-abortion-dobbs-biden-states/
