The Supreme Court on Thursday ducked a major abortion issue, sending a controversial Idaho law back to a lower court.
For now, while the case is pending, Idaho patients requiring medically necessary abortions will no longer need to be airlifted to other states.
However, the decision falls short of a hoped-for ruling requiring emergency-room doctors across the U.S. to follow federal law requiring care in the event of an emergency. Patients outside of Idaho may not be able to obtain abortion care that they need to save their life or to avoid serious health consequences, Vox reports.
The ruling was marred by a leak on Wednesday, the second leak episode at the court in an abortion case. Two years ago, a draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to the press. Two months later, the court released its actual opinion, which resembled the leaked draft.
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On Wednesday, the Idaho ruling leaked, apparently posted by accident on the court's website in advance of its official release on Thursday.
This case marks the first time that the court was confronted with the question of statewide restrictions on abortion, which took effect after the court eliminated a constitutional right to the procedure two years ago, the New York Times reports.
The Idaho case concerned the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires all hospitals that accept Medicare funds to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.”
EMTALA conflicts with an Idaho statute that bans all abortions except when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” When a federal law conflicts with a state law, the Constitution provides that the federal law “shall be the supreme Law of the Land” — and thus the state law is preempted.
Ordinarily, the Supreme Court waits until at least one appeals court has weighed in on an issue. In this case, the court used an unusual process known as “certiorari before judgment” to bypass the appeals court.
Three conservative justices asserted that there is an abortion exception to EMTALA. Justice Samuel Alito made a novel constitutional argument that Idaho must consent before its abortion ban can be preempted by EMTALA.
The Thursday decision does nothing to help patients outside of Idaho, meaning that, in anti-abortion states, there is still scarce jurisprudence about the matter. "Doctors cannot know, and their lawyers cannot advise them, on when it is legal to perform a medically necessary abortion," Vox says.
it may be months or years before the federal courts can start generating the precedents that hospital lawyers need to advise their clients, and that assumes that when the case returns to the Supreme Court, Alito will not secure the votes to write an abortion exception into EMTALA.
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