Idaho asked the Supreme Court on Monday to allow its state abortion ban, which imposes penalties on doctors who perform abortions, to take full effect despite federal requirements for emergency room doctors.
The case comes before the high court more than a year after the justices overturned a constitutional right to abortion, changing the landscape of abortion rights nationwide and prompting more than half the states, including Idaho, to ban or severely restrict the procedure.
Idaho’s Defense of Life Act is a near-total ban on abortion, with an exception to prevent the death of the mother. The law imposes penalties on doctors who perform banned abortions, unless the “physician determined in good medical faith and based on the facts known to the physician at the time that the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman”. Doctors who violated the law could face criminal penalties and risk having their licences suspended.
But a district court blocked the law in hospital emergency rooms that receive Medicare funding, ruling that the state law interfered with a federal Medicare law.
The United States sued, claiming that a provision of a federal Medicare law – the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) – preempted the Idaho law in emergency rooms. The federal law requires hospitals to provide stabilising care to emergency room patients regardless of their ability to pay. The law was enacted to ensure that the poor and uninsured receive emergency medical care in hospitals that receive Medicare reimbursement.
In 2022, Judge B. Lynn Winmill of the US District Court for the District of Idaho said that the “broad scope” of Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion meant that he was not convinced that it would be possible for emergency health care workers to “simultaneously comply with the obligations” of both state and federal law. “State law must therefore yield to federal law to the extent of that conflict.”
A federal appeals court initially agreed to put the district court ruling on hold pending appeal, but a larger panel of judges on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the stay on 13 November.
Now the state, represented by a conservative legal group that opposes abortion, is asking the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis to put the district court ruling on hold while the case is appealed.
“After Dobbs,” Erin Hawley, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, told the justices in court papers, “the United States adopted the novel view that EMTALA creates a federal right to abortion in emergency rooms, even though EMTALA is silent on abortion and actually requires stabilisation for pregnant women’s unborn children.”
A similar case is pending in Texas.