WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to review a fight over emergency abortions in Idaho, allowing the state to refuse care for pregnant people facing medical crises in the meantime.
The nearly four-decade-old Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act is just the latest legal battle over abortion access since the high court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago. Under the law, hospitals can offer abortions to patients facing medical emergencies.
Several states, like Idaho, however, have argued that the law prevents them from enforcing their abortion policies. Idaho — which has enforced an almost complete abortion ban — says its law already provides exceptions when the life of the pregnant person is at risk so the federal protections are not needed.
The conflict over the act began after the Biden administration offered amended guidance on the law after the Supreme Court threw out the right to abortion access. The government clarified0 that hospitals were still required to provide abortions in medical emergencies even if a state banned the procedure.
Idaho’s Defense of Life Act only allows doctors to provide abortions to prevent death. The state also allows abortion in cases of rape or incest but requires those claims to be proven in police reports. Doctors who violate the Defense of Life Act face a minimum two-year prison sentence and license suspension.
The federal government sued Idaho seeking to enforce the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said conditions like sepsis, uncontrollable bleeding, kidney failure and loss of fertility could all cause lasting harm to pregnant individuals not provided emergency abortion care.
“When a woman experiencing such an emergency condition presents in a Medicare-funded hospital, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires the hospital to offer ‘necessary stabilizing treatment,’” Prelogar wrote. "In some cases, the medically necessary care is termination of the pregnancy.”
The government details medical conditions that might require abortion treatment including infection, premature pre-term rupture of membranes, placental abruption, sepsis, pre-eclampsia and eclampsia.
“In some cases, the pregnant patient will likely die absent termination of the pregnancy; in others, the patient will be at risk of irreversible injuries, such as limb amputation, coma, stroke, hysterectomy or organ failure,” Prelogar wrote. “The conditions creating those risks constitute ‘emergency medical condition[s]’ under EMTALA.”
A lower court blocked Idaho’s ban, allowing hospitals to provide abortions in emergency circumstances. However, a three-judge panel of Trump appointees blocked the injunction. The Ninth Circuit then reversed, again allowing the federal protections to go back into place. Idaho and the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives then asked the high court for emergency relief.
“The district court’s injunction effectively turns EMTALA’s protection for the uninsured into a federal super-statute on the issue of abortion, one that strips Idaho of its sovereign interest in protecting innocent human life and turns emergency rooms into a federal enclave where state standards of care do not apply,” Joshua Turner, Idaho’s acting solicitor general, wrote in the state’s application.
Mike Moyle, speaker of Idaho’s House of Representatives, said the federal government’s requirement to provide emergency treatment evoked questions under the major questions doctrine — a new precedent from the court that requires clear authorization from Congress. Moyle says the government uses “stabilizing treatment” as a “blank slate to be filled with the executive branch’s preferred abortion policy.”
Moyle also claimed the federal government was attempting to illicitly undermine Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“Dobbs held that states may regulate abortion, but the preliminary injunction reimposes federal control,” William Duncan, an attorney from Utah representing Moyle, wrote in his application. “That result prevents the State of Idaho and its people from charting their own course regarding abortion, based on a federal mandate that Congress never adopted. Letting the decision below stand would be a sad day for our country.”
The government says the Supreme Court should refuse Idaho and Moyle’s request because there is no real emergency present.
“Applicants’ striking and unexplained delay in seeking relief — and the State’s failure to seek a stay in the lower courts at all — belie their assertions of irreparable harm,” Prelogar wrote. “And on the other side of the ledger, the narrow preliminary injunction is preserving the status quo and protecting women and doctors in Idaho from the devastating harms that would result if doctors could be subjected to criminal prosecution for providing essential emergency care.”
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