According to a draft of the majority opinion briefly posted on the Supreme Court website and obtained by Bloomberg, the nation’s highest court seems poised to allow emergency abortions to take place in Idaho, reinstating a lower court order that said they could be performed to protect the health of the mother.
After the 2022 Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, Idaho Republicans passed a law that banned all abortions except in cases where a doctor explicitly states that the patient will die unless they terminate the pregnancy. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Idaho, arguing a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, overrides state law and require any hospital that receives Medicare funds to treat anyone with an emergency medical condition. When the lower court sided with the Biden administration, Idaho brought the case to the Supreme Court.
The opinion was written by a 6-3 majority, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting, according to Bloomberg. They argued that the case was “improvidently granted,” as in, the court should never have accepted the case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately that delaying the case did not represent a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho, but rather an unnecessary delay.
“While this court dawdles and this country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires,” she said.
Bloomberg noted that the opinion, apparently posted by accident and then taken down, isn’t necessarily the final ruling, given that it hasn’t been officially released. The ruling would temporarily allow emergency abortions to continue in Idaho while the state’s Republican leaders take the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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