Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether emergency room doctors who commit abortions can continue being “shielded from prosecution” despite Idaho’s pro-life statutes. According to the Capital Sun, “If the court were to grant the motion, ER doctors in Idaho would again be subject to criminal penalties and loss of medical licenses for performing an abortion unless it qualified under the state exception to save the pregnant patient’s life.”
In August of 2022, shortly after the fall of Roe v. Wade, a lawsuit from the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) was filed challenging Idaho’s trigger law, which protects virtually all preborn children from abortion. A judge granted an injunction against the law, setting off a legal battle.
According to the DOJ, the law is a violation of the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals receiving federal Medicare funds to provide stabilizing treatment to patients in the emergency room during a medical emergency. The DOJ claims that the law means women’s lives will be at risk, as emergency room doctors will be unable to commit abortions. Yet induced abortion — in which a child is intentionally killed — is not a solution to a medical emergency.
Early delivery, which does not intentionally take a preborn child’s life, is not an induced abortion, and treatments for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages are also not considered induced abortions. The Idaho law does permit abortions to be committed if the woman’s life is at risk, or in cases of rape or incest.
U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued a preliminary injunction against the portion of the law applying to physicians and hospitals dealing with situations where the mother’s life is in danger. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals then overturned Winmill’s injunction… only to then reinstate a stay one month later until a full judicial appeal can be heard.
Labrador is asking the Supreme Court to allow the law to take effect in the meantime.
The emergency application was filed by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “The federal government’s post-Dobbs, revisionist interpretation of EMTALA not only seeks to immunize emergency room abortionists from complying with state law, but also would coerce pro-life emergency room doctors to perform or complete on-demand abortions, including ‘incomplete medical abortions,’ as a ‘necessary’ stabilizing treatment,” they wrote, adding:
Just as EMTALA does not require emergency rooms to provide psychiatric services where they are unavailable … it does not require emergency rooms to provide treatments that are unavailable because state law forbids them. And if emergency rooms need not staff up with psychiatrists, they certainly do not have to staff up with abortionists.
The federal government cannot use EMTALA to override in the emergency room state laws about abortion any more than it can use it to override state law on organ transplants or marijuana use.
