Last Updated on June 30, 2024 by BVN
Breanna Reeves
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 27 that Idaho hospitals are allowed to provide emergency abortions when a patient’s health is at risk. The official ruling came just one day after a document related to the case was unintentionally uploaded to the Court’s website, which Bloomberg News obtained before it was taken down.
In a 6-3 vote, the Court’s decision on Thursday reversed the previous order that allowed a near-total abortion ban to take effect. According to current Idaho law, abortion is illegal except in cases of incest, rape, some cases of nonviable pregnancies, and only when it is “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” The law is punishable by up to five years in prison.
However, the Court’s decision does not directly address the chief issue at hand regarding Idaho’s restrictive abortion ban and federal law, Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), passed by Congress in 1986, which ensures “public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay” across Medicare-participating hospitals.
The three dissenting votes came from Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote a dissenting opinion, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
“Desperate to find some crumb of support for its interpretation, the Government scrapes together a handful of sources that it says evidence a general understanding that EMTALA requires hospitals to perform health-related abortions prohibited by Idaho law. None of these sources stands for that proposition,” wrote Justice Alito.
At the center of the Court’s opinion, Idaho’s law and federal legislation is EMTALA’s interpretation, and whether the federal law recognizes abortion care as life-saving in the event of an emergency.
In 2022, the Biden administration sued Idaho over its abortion ban and asserted the ban violated EMTALA. This resulted in a temporary injunction that prevented the law’s enforcement of an abortion ban in emergency care situations.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision on June 27, they declined to rule on whether Idaho’s near-total abortion ban conflicts with EMLATA, and dismissed the case. The case now returns to a lower court.
“While today’s ruling will provide temporary relief to Idaho patients seeking emergency medical care, the National Health Law Program is disappointed that the Supreme Court chose to sidestep the issue instead of reaffirming the nearly forty-year-old guarantee in EMTALA that all patients, regardless of pregnancy status, deserve emergency medical care,” said Cat Duffy, policy analyst at the National Health Law Program (NHeLP), in a statement. NHeLP is an organization that supports and advances health rights of low-income and underserved individuals.
In a scathing majority opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the justices are, in part, for allowing Idaho’s law to take effect because they stayed the lower courts injunction in Idaho which allowed the law to remain in effect until a further order. She noted that they allowed the case to “sit on our merits docket for five months while we considered the question presented.”
“So, as of today, the Court has not adopted Idaho’s farfetched theories—but it has not rejected them either. Instead, the Court puts off the decision. But how long must pregnant patients wait for an answer?” Justice Jackson wrote. “So, to be clear: Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is delay.”
This case is the second abortion-related case presented to these Justices, following the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, which eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. Since the overthrow of Dobbs, just over a dozen states have enacted abortion bans and have taken steps to criminalize the use and access of abortion medications.