Idaho has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s ruling and allow it to enforce a prohibition on almost all abortions.
The state law – Idaho Code 18-622 or the Defense of Life
Act – only permits abortions to save the life of the mother or if the pregnancy was conceived through rape or incest. Any physician who performs an abortion for any other reason will lose their medical license and can be sentenced to up to two years in prison.
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador wrote in his emergency appeal that the state law does not conflict with federal law and that the Biden administration’s objections do not have legal standing.
The abortion regulation was initially passed in 2020 and was scheduled to go into effect in late August of 2022 following the reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The United States Department of Justice sued Idaho to block the restriction from being enforced.
Less than a week before its effective date, Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled the law violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTLA), which requires doctors at facilities that receive Medicare funding to offer treatments to stabilize anyone who arrives while experiencing an emergency medical crisis. Winmill issued a temporary injunction while the details of the law were refined.
The Idaho Supreme Court had already “ruled that abortion restrictions could move forward while several lawsuits against them played out” and – two weeks earlier – had allowed “a different law to go into effect, one which allows potential relatives of an embryo or fetus to sue abortion providers,” reports CBS News.
After Idaho appealed, the injunction was lifted by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The full court subsequently reinstated the injunction.
“The United States’ position conflicts with the universal agreement of federal courts of appeals that EMTALA does not dictate a federal standard of care or displace state medical standards,” AG Labrador wrote on Nov. 27 in his appeal to the Supreme Court.
“The district court accepted the United States’ revisionist, post-Dobbs reading of EMTALA and enjoined Idaho’s Defense of Life Act in emergency rooms,” he continued. “The district court’s injunction effectively turns EMTALA’s protection for the uninsured into a federal super-statute on the issue of abortion, one that strips Idaho of its sovereign interest in protecting innocent human life and turns emergency rooms into a federal enclave where state standards of care do not apply.”
He argued that Idaho has an urgent interest in receiving an emergency ruling as the state’s goal is to stop “the federal government from using EMTALA—a law intended to protect the indigent in our nation’s emergency rooms—as a weapon to take innocent human life in states that prohibit abortion.”
The Supreme Court has asked the Biden administration to respond by Nov. 30.
