The U.S. SUPREME COURT appeared divided Wednesday on whether Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion conflicts with a federal law that requires hospitals to stabilize patients who need emergency care, in a case that has potentially far-reaching national ramifications.
The hearing comes nearly two years following a conservative-majority panel rolled back the national right to terminate a pregnancy, making reproductive rights a key issue that might influence the outcome of November’s presidential election.
Emotions flowed outside the court where hundreds of women’s rights activists, some of them wrapped in red blood-stained blankets, shouted “Abortion is health care!” Anti-abortion activists also arrived in large numbers and chanted slogans.
After the Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Idaho passed one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the United States.
The law only permits the procedure in cases of rape, incest, and “when necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,” and provides for penalties of up to five years in prison for doctors who perform abortions.
President Joe Biden’s administration later sued the northwest state, arguing Idaho’s Defense of Life Act violated federal law requiring hospitals that receive government Medicare funding to provide emergency room care, including abortion, in serious but not necessarily life-threatening situations. soul.
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A federal judge in Boise, Idaho’s capital, issued a temporary ban in August 2022 blocking the state law on the grounds that it put doctors in a difficult position. But in January the Supreme Court reinstated Idaho’s ban while it reviewed the issue.
Most Americans support some abortion protections, and the backlash once morest strict bans has left Republicans in a tough spot. Highlighting the dilemma facing the party, legislators in Arizona voted Wednesday to repeal an 1864 law that would have almost completely banned abortion in the battleground state following moderate Republicans defected to join Democrats.
Key Votes from Barrett
In Wednesday’s hearing, progressive justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor asked Idaho prosecutor Josh Turner questions regarding egregious examples in which women who are not in immediate danger of death can still suffer severe health consequences if denied an abortion, including loss of fertility.
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Amy Coney Barrett appeared to side with the liberal wing, expressing “surprise” at Turner’s response that such instances would be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Barrett asked what would happen if a doctor decided an abortion was medically necessary but “the prosecutor thought otherwise?”
Chief Justice John Roberts also raised pointed questions regarding who determines whether a doctor has a “benevolent” reason to perform an abortion under Idaho law.
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Meanwhile, Turner sought to portray the government’s case as an attempt to circumvent Idaho’s policy options, expanding exceptions to the abortion ban to cover feelings of depression.
The court’s staunch conservatives, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, appeared particularly receptive to the Idaho case.
Air Delivery for Abortion
Making the case for the Biden administration, U.S. Attorney General Elizabeth Prelogar said the precarious situation for doctors and women in Idaho proves the government’s case.
“If a woman comes to the emergency room facing a serious threat to her health, but she is not yet facing death, doctors should either delay treatment and allow her condition to deteriorate materially, or they airlift her and receive emergency care.”
Prelogar shared a sharp exchange with Alito regarding the use of the wording in federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1986.
Alito argued that if Congress had originally intended to preserve emergency abortion access, it would not have made multiple references to the term “unborn fetus.”
Prelogar said it was written this way to ensure hospitals don’t turn away uninsured women who face pregnancy complications that simply affect the health of their fetus, such as when the umbilical cord becomes pinched.
“But to suggest that by doing that, Congress is implying that the woman herself is not an individual, that she is not worthy of stabilization — I think that’s a misreading of this,” Prelogar said.
“There is nothing to say that a woman is not an individual and that she is not worthy of stabilization,” Alito countered.
A decision in the Idaho case — expected by early summer — might have far-reaching consequences for hospitals across the country, especially in the half-dozen other states that do not have health exceptions to their abortion bans. (AFP/Z-3)
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