The Supreme Court handed down two significant orders on Friday evening. The first announces that the Court will hear a case asking whether former President Donald Trump is disqualified from running for president. The Court’s decision to hear this case was widely expected, and the biggest news in this order is that the Court plans to hear the case on an expedited basis, with oral arguments taking place on February 8.
The second order is more surprising and potentially almost as consequential: The Court temporarily blocked a lower court’s decision holding that patients who require an abortion to save their life or prevent catastrophic health consequences are entitled to such an abortion under federal law.
In the second order, the Court also agreed to hear a pair of cases asking whether federal law requires hospitals to perform medically necessary abortions. Those two cases are called Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States.
Both the Moyle and Idaho cases should be slam dunks in favor of abortion rights. A federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires hospitals that receive Medicare funds — which is nearly all hospitals because Medicare pays for health care for the elderly — 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.” (In limited circumstances, the hospital may transfer the patient to a different facility that will provide this stabilizing treatment, but the patient must receive the treatment.)
EMTALA does not specifically mention abortions, but the law is written expansively and applies a blanket rule. When a patient arrives at an emergency room with a medical emergency, the hospital must stabilize that patient. That means that, if an abortion is the medically appropriate treatment, the patient must receive an abortion.
This rule is triggered, moreover, not only…
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