Pregnant patients in Idaho have been granted temporary access to abortion, but only in the case of medical emergencies.
That’s the result of a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court officially released earlier today. It had accidentally been posted to the court’s website yesterday.
In a six to three split, the court found that it had “improvidently granted” Idaho’s request to vacate the lower court’s injunction putting the law on hold and hear the case before the lower courts had made any decisions.
For now, the Supreme Court has returned the case to the lower courts. The hold granted by a federal district judge is back in place, which means patients should be allowed to get an abortion to save their own health, even if the situation is not life-threatening.
“It is not a win in any way,” Dr. Erin Berry, a gynecologist and Washington state medical director for Planned Parenthood of Western Washington and Idaho, said. “It's really just a delay in making this decision, and therefore, the pregnant people in Idaho and the families in Idaho are sort of in this delay from actually getting a decision.”
“I would expect better from the highest court of the land,” Idaho House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, said in a virtual press briefing.
“They basically said they made this decision to overturn the injunction based on flagrant misrepresentations made in the state of Idaho's briefing, where they had essentially wildly misrepresented the state of affairs,” Rubel said. She was referring to claims in Idaho’s brief that, under the federal government’s reading of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), doctors would be required to give abortions to patients experiencing mental health emergencies or that providers with conscientious objections would be forced to perform abortions. The federal government disputed those interpretations.
“It should not have been eight months later that they realized, ‘Oh, whoops, that was all based on lies and we're gonna reverse ourselves,’” Rubel said.
In a statement, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador characterized the ruling as a step in the right direction for the state’s case. He quoted Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion to call the Biden Administration’s disagreements over the interpretation of EMTALA “concessions” that would “mean that Idaho’s Defense of Life Act ‘remains almost entirely intact.’”
“I remain committed to protect unborn life and ensure women in Idaho receive necessary medical care, and I will continue my outreach to doctors and hospitals across Idaho to ensure that they understand what our law requires,” Labrador’s statement read. “We look forward to ending this Administration’s relentless overreach into Idahoans’ right to protect and defend life.”
Though they acknowledged that under the law, Idaho doctors can now technically provide abortions for patients in medical emergencies, Berry said it doesn’t work like that on the ground. She said physicians are asking, “How sick is too sick? How close to death, how close to serious permanent injury does this patient have to be before I'm allowed to do this life-saving or health-saving procedure?”
“It’s not like there’s a list of conditions out there that have been published that say, ‘These threaten the life, these threaten the health, these don't,’” they said. “That doesn’t exist because you can’t make one.”
Because the case was decided not on the facts but on procedure, many advocates say it’s only a matter of time before the high court will hear this case again.
“Today’s Supreme Court decision regarding EMTALA doesn’t mean an end to this issue, as there will likely be further challenges to the law,” Washington State Medical Association Director and OB-GYN Dr. Nariman Heshmati said.
“Ultimately,” Berry said. “It's just really sad that we're so divided that we can't see the complexities that are really there and just provide good care to the people of our country.”
