The mixture of abortion zealotry and hostility to the demands of conscience is turning into a lethal concoction for our nation’s health-care system.

During last week’s Supreme Court oral argument in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, it looked as if the Biden administration might be preparing to serve up such a toxic potion.

The federal government asserts that its law governing hospital emergency services includes a requirement to perform abortions and preempts Idaho’s recent law, which prohibits most abortions with exceptions for rape and incest and prevention of the death of the mother according to the doctor’s “good-faith medical judgment.” Its alleged federal trump card — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) — requires hospitals that receive Medicare reimbursement to provide “necessary stabilizing treatment” to emergency-room patients regardless of their ability to pay. The administration claims that abortion can be a “necessary stabilizing treatment.”

Note that EMTALA, aimed at preventing “patient dumping,” defines an emergency medical condition as including one “placing the health of the individual (or, with respect to a pregnant woman, the health of the woman or her unborn child) in serious jeopardy.”

Both Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs decision, pointed this out during oral argument. But statutory language mustn’t be allowed to get in the way of Biden’s pro-abortion zeal. Even more troubling than the outright abandonment of EMTALA’s language is the effect of this interpretation on our nation’s health-care system — particularly Catholic hospitals.

Counsel for Idaho raised this issue during argument: “The administration told this Court in the FDA case that individual doctors are never required to perform an abortion from what I could tell, but that doesn’t extend to hospitals. And so, in the case of Catholic hospitals, and there are hundreds of them treating millions of patients every year, under the administration’s reading, Catholic hospitals who faithfully adhere to the ‘Ethical and Religious Directives’ are now required to perform abortions,” he asserted.

Chief Justice John Roberts asked U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar whether the administration’s position “would require religiously affiliated hospitals with emergency rooms to perform abortions.” She said that federal conscience protections applied to entities, as well as individual doctors. And then she added that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “had never come across a hospital that had a blanket objection to providing life-preserving and health-preserving pregnancy termination care [my emphasis].”

Perhaps that is because HHS has only recently concocted the idea that all ERs must also double as abortion facilities.

The administration may be sheepish when it comes to admitting that it will force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions in their emergency rooms, but its allies are not. An amicus brief filed on behalf of former HHS officials, including former Secretary Donna Shalala, displays a sleight of hand in an attempt to inject abortion into the analysis.

“Before 2022, CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] issued multiple statements of deficiencies for hospitals that failed to provide stabilizing care that included abortion,” the former bureaucrats assert, citing incidents at two Catholic hospitals in Michigan and Oklahoma in 2012 and at a Catholic hospital in Oklahoma in 2018.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was only too happy to pick up on this point during argument.

“HHS in countless situations cited hospitals for discharging patients who required an abortion as a stabilizing treatment,” she said, adding for emphasis: “Countless situations.”

Two of the three situations listed in the Shalala brief involved women with ectopic pregnancies. The Idaho law makes clear it doesn’t include such cases. Catholic hospitals are well aware of the importance of treating women facing such a life-threatening situation. Any failure to follow clear guidance on proper care isn’t standing on religious principles — it’s offering poor care. But that clear principle doesn’t stop anti-Catholic mudslinging.

Think I’m exaggerating?

In its commentary on the Court’s review of the Idaho cases, Mother Jones announced that “the decision won’t just affect the ability of red states to regulate medical care for pregnant patients. It also has enormous ramifications for a health care sector that is heavily concentrated in blue states with strong abortion protections: Catholic hospitals.” The progressive magazine isn’t alone.

For years, the ACLU has peddled the idea that Catholic hospitals that operate consistent with Church teaching on the sanctity of the unborn deny women health care and threaten women’s health and lives because of their refusal to perform elective abortions. As the organization puts it, “Religious freedom in America means that we all have a right to our religious beliefs. But it does not give us the right to use our religion to discriminate against and impose those beliefs on others who do not share them — especially when doing so comes at the expense of women’s health and lives.”

Every day, more than one in seven patients are cared for in one of the nation’s 674 Catholic hospitals. Annually, these hospitals attend to nearly 19 million emergency visits. Abortion advocates, especially those in the Biden administration, would think nothing of using the power of the federal government’s purse to force all hospitals — especially Catholic ones — to provide abortions in their ERs, or go out of business. We have been warned.