Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act
(EMTALA). If the court agrees with the states, then doctors who stabilize pregnant patients as required by EMTALA would be at risk of state prosecution and people would probably be denied critical emergency care.” She is also hearing there are explicit plans to enforce the Comstock Act, a Victorian era law that banned the sending of drugs and devices that are contraceptive or abortifacient in the mail.24
The reality is that, in turning the question of a right to an abortion back to the states, Trump effectively reinforced and promoted the agenda for the pro-life movement. It was a tactic the far right would embrace and use in other initiatives.
For example, take the case of transgender rights. Trump waded into the transgender rights fight when claiming he would end transgender care in prisons and jails, and restrict access to gender-affirming care and transgender participation in sports, and more.25 In doing so, not only did Trump appeal to parents who desired to have the final say in family decisions but he once again raised the specter of whether Harris could be trusted, as in 2019, Harris did support “providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment” to inmates.26 Harris providing obfuscated responses about following the letter of the law as to whether she still held that position only added more fodder to the Trump claim that Harris could not be trusted.
But Trump went to the abortion handbook to push the argument over transgender rights by claiming that transgender kids (formerly registered as male) were coming to dominate in women’s sports. His goal was to appeal to parents on both sides of the political spectrum who felt the playing field they worked so hard to expand for their daughters was being eroded by a blanket policy which simply favored a class of individuals through sheer physical strength. After years of work to ensure opportunities offered through Title IX and committing emotional and financial support to ensure their daughters might be able to train and compete at the collegiate level or higher, it seemed commonsensical to these individuals that such decision was both unfair and simply wrong.
But here again, the point was not to discuss the facts or consider what might be viable options within sports but to instead double down on the issue so to attract more religious conservatives to the cause. A perfect example of this tactic was Trump’s outrageous and false claim that doctors and school officials could intervene on behalf of a child suffering from gender dysphoria or desiring a surgical option for change. Trump repeatedly claimed a child could leave for school, have treatment, and return home a different person. It was a claim designed to play upon parent’s fears that not only might they not recognize their child, but would be unable to experience a similar language, culture, or value structure in the future. Theirs would be a child defined and raised by the state, not them. And it went directly to the sophisticated Trump campaign ad that accused Harris and the Democrats of being a campaign for “They/Them,” instead of being for “You.”
This was, of course, brought home during the last days of the campaign with the U.S. Supreme Court taking up the Tennessee case over medical care for transgender minors, U.S. v. Skrmetti. Tennessee had enacted a blanket ban on any gender affirming care, regardless of what the person wanted, what parents wanted, or what doctors recommended. (As an aside, it should be noted that 26 states have moved to prohibit administration of puberty-blocking medication and hormone therapy to minors who seek to identify with, or live as, a gender identity inconsistent with his or her sex at birth.)
The suit was brought on behalf of three minors, all of whom had been receiving gender affirming care and would have to stop receiving care if the ban was upheld. The foundations of the suit was based upon two principles: 1) due process grounds, through which they claimed it should be doctors and parents making the decision with their child, not the state; and 2) equal protection grounds, through which they claimed the ban constituted sex discrimination
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