The Supreme Court delivered a win on abortion to the Biden administration Thursday by erasing an order that had prevented the government from demanding Idaho allow the procedure in emergency situations despite a state law severely restricting abortions.
The justices decided that they had been premature in agreeing to hear the case, saying the facts are still too murky at this point and need more development in lower courts.
The ruling also exposed ongoing problems at the court. A draft opinion was briefly posted Wednesday to the court’s website, signaling what was to come.
It’s the second time an abortion-related ruling has leaked out of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s court, following the 2022 leak of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and authorized states to impose new restrictions on abortion.
Idaho was one of those that took up the invitation, adopting a full ban. It was one of more than a dozen states that have worked to ban the procedure in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The Biden administration, seeking to push back on conservative states, sued, saying the ban conflicted with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, a federal law that requires states that accept federal health funds to provide necessary emergency care to stabilize a patient.
Under that law, hospitals must deliver stabilizing treatment in emergencies — including abortions, the federal government argued.
The Biden administration says in some cases that means abortions must be performed where it’s deemed the correct course for the mother’s health.
A U.S. District Court judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had sided with the Biden administration, and the Supreme Court, in its new ruling, allowed that injunction to take effect.
The high court issued an unsigned opinion saying the case had been “improvidently granted,” meaning the court should not have yet taken the case.
The justices did not, however, reach a decision on whether the Biden administration is right. That issue remains open for argument in this case, and others are still making their way up through lower courts, including a case out of Texas.
The Supreme Court decided earlier this year to take up the case, rushing it to the justices’ docket without having gone through the federal appellate court level with a final judgment.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, said the court had made a “miscalculation” in speeding the case. She said the two sides’ positions “are still evolving.”
The scope of Idaho’s law has been clarified by state decisions, even as the federal government has said its understanding of the reach of the federal law “more modest” than they’d first argued, Justice Barrett said.
Plus, she said, there’s a new constitutional argument brewing over whether a law like EMTALA, which uses Congress’s spending power, enjoys the same supremacy over states that other federal laws do.
“We should not jump ahead of the lower courts, particularly on an issue of such importance,” Justice Barrett wrote in an opinion joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, and Chief Justice Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee.
The court also divided over whether abortion counts as emergency care and what rights the unborn child has in the law.
“Far from requiring hospitals to perform abortions, EMTALA’s text unambiguously demands that Medicare-funded hospitals protect the health of both a pregnant woman and her ’unborn child,’” wrote Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., a George W. Bush appointee.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court’s three Democratic appointees, disagreed, saying the unborn language was added to make sure women got care in situations where their health was not in peril but their fetus’s was.
“The amendment would likely have sparked far more opposition if it somehow tacitly withdrew EMTALA’s requirement that hospitals treat women who need an abortion to prevent death or serious harm,” wrote Justice Kagan, an Obama appointee.
She said occasions where EMTALA will force an abortion will be “rare.”
President Biden celebrated the outcome and complained about the state of abortion law after the Dobbs decision.
“No woman should be denied care, made to wait until she’s near death, or forced to flee her home state just to receive the health care she needs,” the president said in a statement. “Yet, this is exactly what is happening in states across the country since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.”
He said abortion will be an issue for voters in November’s election.
The case is Moyle v. U.S.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.