Supreme Court temporarily reinstates Idaho’s strict abortion ban
The Supreme Court temporarily revived Friday Idaho’s near-total ban on abortions, which was blocked in part by a federal judge who heard a challenge to the law from the Biden administration. The court also agreed to hear an appeal in the case, with oral arguments scheduled for April.
The court’s brief order did not provide any reasoning, which is typical of judges who act in urgent cases.
The law, which took effect in 2020, included a trigger provision that went into effect 30 days after a U.S. Supreme Court decision “returning to states their authority to ban abortion.” The decision in the Dobbs case did so, and the law would come into effect in August 2022.
The law made an exception for abortions “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,” but not to address threats to a woman’s health.
The Justice Department challenged the law under a federal statute, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Actwhich requires hospitals that receive Medicare funding and have emergency care to provide the treatment needed to stabilize patients.
That federal law conflicted with and replaced Idaho’s abortion ban. the lawsuit saidbecause the state ban prohibited doctors from performing abortions when necessary to stabilize patients.
“Even in dire situations that might qualify for the limited defense of the Idaho law that ‘necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,’” the lawsuit says, “some health care providers may withhold care based on a well-founded fear of criminal prosecution.”
Under state law, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar told the judges“An emergency room physician who concludes that a pregnant woman requires an abortion to stabilize a condition that would otherwise threaten serious and irreversible harm should not provide the necessary care unless and until the patient’s condition deteriorates to the point where an abortion is necessary to save her life.”
“If the doctor performs the abortion, she faces charges, arrest, pretrial detention, loss of her medical license, a misdemeanor trial and at least two years in prison,” Judge Winmill wrote. “But if the doctor does not perform the abortion, the pregnant patient faces serious risks to her health – such as severe sepsis requiring limb amputation, uncontrollable uterine bleeding requiring hysterectomy, renal failure requiring lifelong dialysis, hypoxic brain injury or even death. ”
“And this woman, if she survives, may have to live with significant disabilities and chronic medical conditions for the rest of her life as a result of her pregnancy complication,” the judge continued. “All because Idaho law prohibited the doctor from performing the abortion.”
Judge Winmill said his ruling was limited. “This is not about the lost constitutional right to abortion,” he wrote. “The court is called upon to answer a much more modest question: whether Idaho’s criminal abortion statute violates a small but important part of federal law. It does.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, puts Judge Winmill’s ruling on hold in September, the state’s abortion ban was reinstated. The panel said any conflict between state and federal laws was resolved by a decision of the Idaho Supreme Court in January upheld the law but interpreted it to give doctors more leeway in determining when the procedure is necessary to save the woman’s life.
Last month, however, an 11-member appeals court panel changed course and blocked the law while it heard an appeal. The debates are scheduled for the end of January.
Idaho and state lawmakers have asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The Federal Emergency Treatment Act wrote state attorneys“requires only that hospitals treat indigent patients the same as anyone else.”
The filing added: “The only specific care required by the statute is that of to deliver – do not abort – a woman’s child during childbirth, treating medical emergencies faced by ‘the unborn child’ of a pregnant woman no differently than emergencies faced by the woman herself.”
The state legislatures, in their applicationwrote of the federal law that “a statute that endorses childbirth as a stabilizing treatment and mentions unborn children four times is (to say the least) an unpromising candidate for a national abortion mandate.”