The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, in a 6-3 opinion, temporarily allowed abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho.
The opinion was erroneously posted on the court's website on Wednesday. The decision reinstates a lower court ruling that temporarily allowed hospitals in the state to perform emergency abortions to protect the life of the mother, and the health of the mother. Three of the court's conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — sided with the three liberals — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — in dismissing the appeal from Idaho without considering the core issues in the case.
Dissenting were Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas. But the Idaho case will no doubt put abortion back into the political limelight as a major controversy, just months before the presidential election, and it could alleviate some of the hostility to the court fomented by the decision two years ago overturning Roe v. Wade .
Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as EMTALA, in 1986 to prevent hospitals from refusing care for uninsured patients or dumping them on other hospitals. The law says that as a condition for receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds, hospital emergency departments must stabilize a patient whose life or health is at risk. And if the hospital can’t do that, is must transfer the patient to a hospital than can.
That was all well and go.