The United States Supreme Court ruled this Thursday to allow, for now, abortions in the state of Idaho when pregnant women face medical emergencies. The judges limited themselves to maintaining the previous decision of a lower court, which could open the door for this controversial matter to be brought before the Supreme Court again.
The 6-3 ruling, with three of the six conservative justices dissenting, reinstated a state court ruling that held that Idaho’s near-total abortion ban must yield to a 1986 federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) if the two statutes conflict.
A version of the ruling was inadvertently posted Wednesday on the court’s website. The text was quickly removed, but not before American media obtained it.
The opinion published this Thursday by the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, seems very similar to the draft. With it, a block that the judges had placed on the lower court ruling in January was lifted.
However, the decision does not resolve the central issues of the case and instead chooses to dismiss the case, meaning that the same judges who voted two years ago to repeal the constitutional right to abortion in the USthey may soon reconsider when doctors can perform this procedure in emergency cases.
President Joe Biden’s administration had sued Idaho, arguing that EMTALA preempts state law. EMTALA ensures that patients can receive emergency care at hospitals that receive funding from the federal Medicare program. Idaho is among six states that almost entirely ban abortion and offer no exceptions to protect the health of pregnant women.
“Today’s Supreme Court order ensures that women in Idaho can access the emergency medical care they need while this case makes its way back to the lower courts,” Biden said in a statement. “No woman should be denied care, forced to wait until she is near death, or forced to flee her home state just to get the medical care she needs. This should never happen in America.”
“Yet, this is exactly what is happening in states across the country since The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade“Biden added, referring to the 2022 decision that reversed the 1973 precedent that had recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
Biden, who seeks re-election this yearhas tried to make abortion rights a centerpiece of his campaign.
Former President Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate and responsible for appointing three of the six judges who were in the majority in the 2022 abortion ruling, has highlighted his role in this decision.
Lupe Rodríguez, executive director of the National Institute of Latinas for Reproductive Justice, said in a statement sent to the Voice of America that while she is relieved that the Supreme Court “dismissed this case,” they ultimately “failed to uphold protections for pregnant patients or ensure that anti-abortion extremists cannot deny them emergency abortion care” at the federal level.
Rodriguez said that since the Supreme Court’s “disastrous decision” to overturn Roe v. Wade two years ago, “access to abortion care has been decimated” and warned that “communities of color are visiting emergency rooms at a higher rate due to systemic barriers to care.”
In addition, he insisted that the attacks will continue “as part of the ultimate goal of anti-abortion extremists to ban abortion throughout the country.”
For her part, Gretchen Borchelt, vice president of reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center, said the Supreme Court “does not deserve any credit for this decision.”
“This is the bare minimum that pregnant people and providers in Idaho deserve. The Court created this crisis when it overturned Roe and then again when it allowed Idaho’s criminal abortion ban to be struck down, in full force, unnecessarily and with dire consequences, as the Court now admits,” she added.
Borchelt also emphasized that they are “in a dangerous situation” with this Court, since three of the judges “are willing to let patients bleed in the parking lots.”
‘Fragile détente’
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a separate opinion agreed with the court’s decision to lift his suspension but said she would not have dismissed the case, calling the legal situation a “fragile détente.”
“This court had the opportunity to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation, and we have squandered it,” Jackson wrote. “And as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho, Texas and elsewhere will pay the price.”
In another case, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision on June 13, rejected an attempt by anti-abortion groups and doctors to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone, considering that the plaintiffs lacked the necessary legal standing to pursue litigation against the US Food and Drug Administration. The justices also did not decide the underlying legal issues in that case, ruling that the anti-abortion groups and doctors who brought the challenge lacked the necessary legal standing to bring the case.
Idaho’s so-called abortion “trigger” law, adopted in 2020, automatically went into effect following the overturn of Roe. The state law banned nearly all abortions unless they were necessary to prevent the death of the mother, threatening doctors who violated it with two to five years in prison and the loss of their medical license.
EMTALA requires hospitals that receive funding from the federal Medicare program to “stabilize” patients with emergency medical conditions. Medical experts have said that conditions that could threaten a woman’s life and health – from gestational hypertension to excessive bleeding – could require an abortion to stabilize her or prevent seizures, damage and failure of vital organs or the loss of the uterus.
Boise-based U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill in 2022 blocked the application of Idaho’s law in cases of abortions that are necessary to avoid putting the woman’s health in “serious danger” or risking “serious impairment of bodily functions.”
In a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, 82% of registered voters who responded, including 88% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans, said they supported requiring states with strict abortion bans to allow an abortion if necessary to protect the health of a pregnant patient facing a medical emergency.
About 57% of respondents said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 46% in surveys by Reuters/Ipsos made a decade ago. About 31% of respondents in the May poll said abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, up from 43% in 2014 polls. About 10% of respondents consistently say they are not insurance.
[Con información de Reuters y AP]
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