In early June 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would no longer enforce the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). The Act, enacted in 1986, requires Medicaid-funded emergency rooms to provide life-saving care regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. This protection includes administering emergency abortions, which the Biden administration provided federal guidance on in 2022. The emergency abortion guidance in particular was rescinded under the Trump administration’s rollback.
Catholic hospitals have long challenged the EMTALA Act on the basis of religious liberty, and the Trump administration’s decision now empowers them to deny care to people in need of emergency abortions. In January 2025, the Catholic Medical Association—along with Alliance Defending Freedom—filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that the administration’s guidance requiring hospitals to perform emergency abortions violated the Free Exercise Clause. The Alliance Defending Freedom, the organization defending the Catholic Medical Association, voluntarily dismissed the case in light of the Trump administration’s decision. However, the case’s filing shows that Catholic hospitals still do not want to comply with the law to keep people alive.
Not all Catholics share this anti-abortion sentiment, however. Ashley Hildebrand of Catholics for Choice offered:
“As Catholics, we believe that all people have a right to healthcare—and that includes abortion access. It is not lost on us that one of the instigators of this policy change is the Catholic Medical Association, which challenged the guidance in court. They have pushed a narrow doctrine over medicine, and they do not represent the views of Catholics. Let us be abundantly clear: Most Catholics think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That certainly includes medical emergencies.”
If a state, fueled by religious verbiage, prevents doctors from performing abortions, who is to say that it is the doctor’s religion to follow that law?
And what if the law allows for exceptions, but the decision-making and the state’s oversight make these exceptions nonbinding? Do the doctors still need to follow the law?
In January 2025, five doctors sued the state of South Carolina against the 2023 Heartbeat Law, which prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, or after about nine weeks. Their lawsuit is particularly important, as the Heartbeat Law was instrumental in the state Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the six-week abortion ban. For these doctors, not only is the decision devastating for patients, but exemplifies why anti-abortion advocates, lawmakers, and religious leaders should not be allowed to use their faith to implement a life-threatening law that doctors must unquestionably follow.
The plaintiffs have therefore inverted faith-based pro-life logic by counter-arguing the questions: Don’t doctors who need to administer abortions get to use their faith to challenge such laws? And if the other side can claim conscientiousness to prohibit abortion, then why can’t doctors claim conscientiousness to protect their right to perform abortions?
Dr. Dawn Bingham, the lead plaintiff in Bingham, et. al v. Wilson, said her faith and her medical training compel her to heal her patients.
The plaintiffs claim the medical exceptions the law allows for—protecting the life of the mother, fetal anomalies, and, in cases of rape and incest—still prevent providers from performing abortions because the exceptions are too vague. Each abortion performed has to be reported to the state medical board, and it is this oversight that paralyzes doctors in providing care.
One of the plaintiffs had firsthand experience navigating this barrier, as one of their patients needed an abortion because her pregnancy was causing her kidneys to fail.
Her kidney failure was preventable. The Heartbeat Law does not prohibit abortions for preventing the death of pregnant people, if the physician determines the case is a medical emergency, or poses the serious risk of a substantial or irreversible impairment of a major bodily function. However, because each abortion performed has to be reported to the state medical board, doctors fear performing any abortion may result in their losing their medical license, incurring a steep fine, or serving jail time.
Like with the rollback of EMTALA—which confuses doctors on next steps in providing care to patients needing an abortion, especially in states with abortion bans—Dr. Bingham and the other doctors cite South Carolina providers’ apprehension of abortions in compliance with the state law in their suit.
“Doctors are wracked with fear that a prosecutor would accuse them of performing an unlawful abortion,” said Alison Zimmer of The Lawyering Project, the organization litigating the case.
This fear delays and, in some cases, denies abortion care and puts the birthing person’s life at risk. In the case of the doctor’s patient, the hospital could not conclude that her condition was “irreversible enough” to justify an abortion. Due to the delayed care, the patient’s creatinine levels will never return to normal, which has further accelerated her disease and may require a transplant.
“At what point do we as doctors decide when the birthing person is facing death? In the next ninety seconds? In the next 90 minutes? In the next two days, two weeks? In a month? Clinical care is nuanced, and it takes acumen to judge how someone is going to do with a particular pregnancy,” said Dr. Bingham.
This nuance should be determined by the doctor treating the patient and the patient themselves, not a hospital oversight board, law enforcement, a prosecutor, or a lawmaker.
As faithful people and healers, it is against the doctor’s faith to watch a patient suffer when they can intervene. Dr. Bingham follows the teachings of the book of James, New Testament Scripture. Its theology prioritizes material change instead of pithy platitudes. James 2:26 is often quoted and is central to Dr. Bingham’s belief: “Faith without works is dead.”
“For people who are trained to take care of [others], who also have strong belief systems, they have their own conscience about providing abortions. If there is a right to deny care, there is a right to provide care,” said Dr. Bingham. “If I have to wait until my patient is dying, I have not done my job.”
Dr. Melanie Dobson, a professor of ethics at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Lenoir-Rhyne University, said that Dr. Bingham isn’t alone, as many Christians follow a “virtue ethic.”
Virtue ethics is a broad term for decision-making that emphasizes a person or situation’s character over duty, or acting in order to bring about good consequences. In other words, it doesn’t follow the rigid rules; it looks at the individual situation.
The issue with ethical or religious abortion debates is that people’s stance on the matter is determined by their belief systems. Many abortion opponents follow a belief system that all life and all potential life is worth preserving, no matter the conditions, while many pro-abortion proponents believe full access to abortion care for all yields the greatest good for all people. Legally, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment categorically prohibits the government from regulating, prohibiting, or rewarding religious beliefs as such. So, for whatever reason one is anti-abortion or pro-abortion, practicing their rights should be left to the individual alone, not the state government.
Dr. Dobson said that practicing virtue ethics compels providers to focus on the person in front of them, trust their own experience to advocate for themselves, and care for them in the way they need. Care under virtue ethics doesn’t adhere to rules or focus on the consequences of actions.
“What kind of people do we need to care for this person?” said Dr. Dobson. “How do we accompany this person? How do we practice wisdom? What is prudent?”
Even Catholic ethics supports abortion. For example, Kate Hoeting, the senior advisor for Catholics for Choice and a Catholic theologian, is also an abortion doula.
“My faith is the reason I am an abortion doula. Some of the most holy experiences that I’ve had have been in the clinic. I’m so proud to stand behind these doctors, who are really, you know, describing conscientious provision,” said Hoeting.
While many Americans think anti-abortion beliefs are intrinsic to Catholicism, the church’s philosophy is not necessarily anti-abortion. The Catholic Church neglected to state anything on abortion until 1917, when the Church classified abortion as an “unspeakable crime,” and asserted, “from the moment of its conception, life must be guarded with the greatest care.” This is important because church leadership had to consider the topic of abortion, which, previously, without the Code of Canon Law, was simply a fact of life. For example, Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century Benedictine abbess, instructed pregnant people looking to relieve a “danger to their bodies” to take tansy to bring about menstruation, or to terminate any pregnancy they may have.
“St. Aquinas believed a person was alive at ‘ensoulment,’ or [that an] embryo is enclosed with a human soul, which happens at a dubious point of pregnancy,” said Hoeting. St. Thomas Aquinas followed the philosophy of Aristotle, who believed that a soul formed at the formation of the body, which had yet to be determined by modern medicine.
Furthermore, according to an NPR poll, 6 in 10 Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and, according to Guttmacher, 1 in 4 abortion patients are Catholic. Abortion access is necessary for Catholic people of faith.
The consequences of denying abortions to patients are dire, especially in the South. In Georgia, Adriana Smith, a pregnant woman who was declared brain dead in February, had been subject to the hospital holding her body hostage and keeping her vital organs operating with machines until she could deliver the baby. In April, Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was arrested in Georgia for having a miscarriage. While the charges have since been dropped, criminalization of providing, seeking, and receiving abortion care incites increased fear among birthing people navigating medical emergencies that require an abortion.
Dr. Bingham et. al. cited this criminalization and fear in their lawsuit against the State of South Carolina. The physicians refer to the case of a woman who was on a road trip through South Carolina and began hemorrhaging from her uterus. She stopped in an emergency room, and while she was being treated, five armed police officers appeared at the hospital. They questioned the patient as she sat in a pool of blood and forced the doctor to explain to the police that she had simply miscarried in her first trimester.
The 2023 Heartbeat Law, coupled with the refusal to enforce EMTALA, will cause bodily harm and even death for pregnant people in the 14 states with harsh abortion restrictions. Structural inequality dictates that the effects of these prohibitions will be especially severe for Black people, lower-income people, and people of color. The threat that these restrictions pose to human lives renders them absolutely against the faith ethic of Dr. Bingham and her co-plaintiffs.
“You should be able to take care of someone according to your conscience and your training. That is informed by our faith,” Dr. Bingham said.