Anti-abortion advocates asked the Supreme Court to intervene in a federal case in Idaho regarding whether or not emergency room physicians should be shielded from prosecution under the state's total abortion ban.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian religious freedom legal organization, filed an emergency application for a stay while the law was being reviewed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Idaho has one of the strictest abortion bans in the United States, with exceptions to save the life of the mother or if the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest.
The current law stipulates that emergency room doctors in Idaho who perform an abortion unless it qualifies under the life-saving exception, could be subject to criminal penalties and loss of medical licenses. The law was blocked shortly after it was enacted Aug. 2022, following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
United States District Judge B. Lynn Winmill, a Bill Clinton appointee, affirmed the position of the Department of Justice that the law violates the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA.
EMTALA requires any medical system that accepts Medicare funding to provide stabilizing care to patients coming into emergency rooms regardless of their ability to pay, requiring physicians and staff to ensure a person's condition won't deteriorate significantly if transferred to a different facility. Federal attorneys argue that criminal charges against ER physicians violate EMTALA in ambiguous medical situations.
Due to a legal loophole, the criminal charges provision was allowed to go into effect for two weeks in Oct. 2022. During that time, one patient in Idaho had to be transferred to Salt Lake City, Utah, after her water broke at 20 weeks of pregnancy and she developed a uterine infection. Physicians in the facility saw an abortion as medically necessary in the moment.
At 20 weeks gestation, the heart and lung development of a fetus is very fragile, making viability outside of the womb extremely unlikely in the majority of cases. Sepsis, a blood infection that can develop very quickly in emergency situations, can cause organ failure within as little as 12 hours, killing one in four patients.
“Hospitals — especially emergency rooms — are centers for preserving life. The government has no business transforming them into abortion clinics,” said ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley in a press release, noting that physicians "can, and do" treat medical emergencies, such as ectopic pregnancies.
"But elective abortion is not life-saving care — it ends the life of the unborn child — and the government has no authority to override Idaho’s law barring these procedures," added Hawley.
ADF's appeal to the Supreme Court argues that EMTALA "does not dictate a federal standard of care or displace state medical standards," saying that the circuit court's ruling "effectively turns EMTALA's protection for the uninsured into a federal super statute on the issue of abortion."
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“EMTALA is silent on abortion and actually requires stabilizing treatment for the unborn children of pregnant women," argues ADF.
The motion indicates that ADF attorneys would be able to argue the case as soon as April.