THURSDAY, June 27, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- The U.S. Supreme Court appears ready to rule that, for now, emergency abortions be allowed in Idaho when a woman's health is at risk, an opinion that was briefly posted on the court's website on Wednesday shows.
The unsigned opinion , published first by Bloomberg News , only dismissed the case on procedural grounds, stating the court would not address the merits of the dispute at this time. The case centers on whether a federal law requiring emergency care for any patient, including a pregnant woman, overrides Idaho’s strict abortion ban, which outlaws the procedure with few exceptions unless the woman’s life is in danger. Whether the document was final remains unclear, and a spokeswoman for the court said only that a decision would eventually be released, the New York Times reported.
“The court’s publications unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the court’s website,” court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe told the Times . “The court’s opinion in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v.
United States will be issued in due course.” Still, the split laid out in the opinion was essentially 6 to 3, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing that she would have found the federal law overrides Idaho’s strict ban and that she believed the Supreme Court should tackle the issue now, rather than sending it back to the lower court. The liberal justices, along with conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kav.