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WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has revoked a Biden-era health guideline that protected emergency abortions when medically required, even in states that ban the procedure.

The Biden-era memo was issued in July 2022, weeks after the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutionally enshrined right to abortion.

As health providers suddenly found themselves embroiled in legal uncertainty over abortion, the memo provided an interpretation of the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), arguing it supersedes state abortion laws when needed to stabilize a pregnant patient.

The directive was fiercely contested by anti-abortion advocates.

In a letter Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the EMTALA guidance did not reflect the current administration’s policy.

“CMS is rescinding this memo ... effective May 29, 2025, consistent with Administration policy,” it said.

Offering its own interpretation, CMS said EMTALA provides the right for any hospital patient to receive “either stabilizing treatment or an appropriate transfer to another hospital.”

It said the US Health and Human Services would no longer enforce the Biden-era guidance.

The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute said the Trump administration’s revocation of the EMTALA guidelines showed “callous disregard for the law and people’s lives.”

Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert at Georgetown University, wrote in the New York Times that the CMS letter “basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril.”

According to Guttmacher, 13 US states, mostly in the south and east of the country, have “a total abortion ban” as of May 28.

While these states generally provide narrow exceptions in the event of a threat to the mother’s life, it is unclear what constitutes a life-threatening condition in the eyes of the law.

Since returning to office, US President Donald Trump has taken a series of moves to restrict abortion access.

In his first week back in the White House, Trump revoked two executive orders protecting access to a pill widely used to terminate pregnancies and the ability to travel to states where the procedure is not banned.

MOSCOW: US President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy said the risk of escalation from the war in Ukraine was “going way up” after Ukrainian forces used drones to strike nuclear-capable bombers at several air bases deep inside Russia.
Ukraine said it attacked airfields in Siberia and Russia’s far north over the weekend, striking targets up to 4,300 km (2,670 miles) from the front lines of the conflict.
“I’m telling you, the risk levels are going way up — I mean, what happened this weekend,” Trump’s envoy, Keith Kellogg, told Fox News.
“People have to understand in the national security space: when you attack an opponent’s part of their national survival system, which is their triad, the nuclear triad, that means your risk level goes up because you don’t know what the other side is going to do. You’re not sure.”
Russia and the United States together hold about 88 percent of all nuclear weapons.
Each power has three main ways of attacking with nuclear warheads, known as the nuclear triad: strategic bombers, land-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Kellogg said the damage to the Russian bombers at the weekend was less important than the psychological impact on Russia and that he was particularly concerned by unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian attack on a naval base in northern Russia.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday that Trump had not been informed in advance of Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russia’s bombers.
Russia and Ukraine held talks in Istanbul on Monday but made little headway toward ending the war that has raged since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine more than three years ago.
Kellogg said Ukraine had come up with a “very reasonable position” but Russia had come with a “very maximalist position,” and that the aim now was to “try to bridge that.”