A federal law, known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), requires hospitals that accept Medicare funds to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.”
The language unambiguously requires these hospitals to provide an abortion to such patients when an abortion is the appropriate medical treatment to stabilize their emergency medical condition. And a federal court in Idaho held more than a year ago that this statute requires hospitals to provide medically necessary abortions even if the procedure would ordinarily be banned under state law.
Now we’re about to find out whether the Supreme Court will follow the text of EMTALA, in a pair of cases known as Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States. (Both cases present similar issues, but the Idaho case was brought to the Supreme Court by Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, a Republican, while the Moyle case was brought by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.)
The trial court that heard these cases held that EMTALA trumps (or “preempts,” to use the appropriate legal term) Idaho’s sweeping abortion ban, which generally allows doctors to perform abortions only when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”
This trial court decision did not fully legalize abortion in Idaho, nor did it come close to doing so. But it did hold that federal law requires Idaho hospitals to provide abortion care to patients who are at risk of “serious impairment to bodily functions,” “serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part,” or other nonfatal consequences that are defined as medical emergencies by EMTALA.
In both the Idaho and the Moyle cases, Idaho officials ask the Supreme Court to block this lower court’s decision, despite EMTALA’s unambiguous language, and there’s at least some risk that the Court’s…
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