The Supreme Court is poised to rule on another major abortion case this week as it finishes up the 2023-2024 term.With three opinion days left, the justices still have more than a dozen rulings to announce before the end of the week. That includes a case challenging Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, Moyle v. United States.The case began just a few weeks after the Supreme Court issued its bombshell Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion that was established in Roe v. Wade. Idaho, like many Republican-led states in the country, had a trigger ban that would restrict access to abortions should Roe fall.Under the Idaho law, a medical exception only applies when a doctor judges that “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” There are also exceptions for rape or incest, although only in the first trimester and if the person files a police report.The Justice Department sued Idaho just weeks after Roe was overturned, arguing that the state law was “invalid” because federal emergency care law preempts Idaho’s abortion law.The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires hospitals that receive Medicare funding to offer “necessary stabilizing treatment” to pregnant women in emergencies, not just to prevent their deaths.”Moyle will push the limits of state abortion bans,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Newsweek. “If states can ban abortions even in cases of medical emergencies when there is federal law that says otherwise, then there is little to nothing standing in the way of total abortion bans.”The lower courts have been divided. A district court sided with the Biden administration, while an appeals court sided with Idaho. The Supreme Court agreed to allow the strict ban to take effect in January while it weighed the case. Oral arguments were presented to the bench in April.Many have closely watched the Supreme Court to see exactly how it rules on abortion in the wake of Dobbs. The court made its first abortion decision since overturning Roe less than two weeks ago, delivering a win to abortion advocates when it unanimously preserved access to mifepristone, a pill used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions.But while the justices were willing to side with the federal Food and Drug Administration over the medication’s approval, they are poised to rule in favor of Idaho’s law this week.Rahmani, who is the president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, explained that the ruling on mifepristone was different because while the liberal justices on the bench decided the case in an effort to protect abortion rights, the conservative justices only agreed with their colleagues “on narrow standing grounds.””They want to limit lawsuits by those who haven’t suffered any real injury, including the doctors in the case who had no legal obligation to prescribe abortion drugs,” Rahmani said.Former federal prosecutor and elected state attorney Michael McAuliffe agreed, saying that mifepristone was based on standing and “not on any substantive review of the FDA process or abortion.”In Moyle, however, “the dispute is whether [Department of Health and Human Services] exceeded its authority in issuing a ruling that the general federal statute controls over the very specific state abortion prohibition,” McAuliffe told Newsweek.EMTALA was enacted to prevent hospital emergency rooms from transferring uninsured or low-income people to other facilities without stabilizing their medical conditions first, but it is a sweeping law in both scope and topic.Legal analyst Joyce Vance argued Monday that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Moyle could “impact emergency room care across the country, whichever way the case is decided” because it could force doctors to choose between their careers and patients.Because doctors in Idaho have to wait until after an indictment to argue that an abortion was necessary, “doctors can be arrested and charged even though the medical procedure was necessary.””When it comes to this term’s abortion cases, there has always been reason to believe that although the Court probably won’t go so far as to ban medication abortion completely in the mifepristone case, the EMTALA case is likely to go in favor of Idaho,” Vance wrote on her blog Civil Discourse in April.”The hope is that the loss in EMTALA will be the narrowest one possible, one that avoids further devastation of women’s access to care and the medical risks we’re now seeing them face.”
Subscribe
Login
0 Comments
