Supreme Court won’t disturb Texas bar on emergency abortions

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a Texas ban on emergency abortion access.

After the high court in June prevented Idaho from enforcing a similar ban on pregnancy termination under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act or EMTALA, the Biden administration urged the justices to likewise review Texas’ prohibitions on abortion access.

The justices declined to do so — though they didn’t explain their decision to allow a lower court ruling to stand. There were no noted dissents.

Under EMTALA, federally funded hospitals must treat patients with health emergencies. And even after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Biden administration said the federal protection still extended to emergency abortions necessary to protect the life or health of a pregnant person.

Conservative states resisted the administration’s order, claiming their abortion bans superseded EMTALA.

They argued bans provided adequate exceptions for the life of the mother. But the Biden administration, medical associations and individual doctors insisted that delaying emergency abortion care until that qualifier was met further risked pregnant people’s health.

Last month, ProPublica reported that two women in Georgia died after not receiving emergency abortion care under new state restrictions.

Texas and two organizational groups argued the U.S. secretary of health and human services didn’t have the authority to force the Lone Star State to provide emergency abortions. A lower court agreed to block the government from enforcing EMTALA. The Fifth Circuit affirmed.

Arguing for the feds, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the appeals court ruling should have been reversed, forcing the Fifth Circuit to review the case again following the Idaho ruling.

Without deciding whether Idaho’s Defense of Life Act superseded EMTALA, the justices upheld federal emergency access in the state. The unusual ruling made clear that doctors cannot be forced to provide abortion care against their conscience.

Prelogar argued there was a reasonable probability that the Idaho ruling, among other decisions, would change the outcome at the Fifth Circuit. The government also cited a Texas Supreme Court ruling that said doctors do not have to wait until a pregnant person is dying to provide emergency abortion care.

“Taken together, those developments create at least a reasonable probability that the lower courts would find that this case does not present a justiciable controversy or that they would take a different view of the merits if they conclude jurisdiction exists to reach them,” Prelogar wrote.

But Texas pushed back, arguing that its case diverged from Idaho’s in important ways.

The Lone Star State had sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for its policy memorandum on emergency abortion care. But in the Idaho case, it was the Biden administration that first sued the Potato State over its noncompliance with EMTALA.

“Accordingly, this case is an improper vehicle to assess whether EMTALA ‘preempts state law’ where abortion is supposedly ‘required to stabilize an emergency medical condition that would otherwise threaten serious harm to the pregnant woman’s health,” Texas wrote.

If Idaho’s case is appealed back to the justices, the court will have another opportunity to review whether EMTALA can override state bans.

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