The fight over emergency abortion care
“Women’s health is not a priority” for this Supreme Court, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. That much was clear last week during arguments on whether Idaho’s near-total abortion ban violates a federal law requiring ERs to provide “stabilizing care” for any patient, including abortions for women who face serious health risks from continuing their pregnancy. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked if that ban—which allows terminations only if the life of the mother is in danger—prevented abortions in instances where a woman would otherwise lose an organ, Idaho’s lawyer, Joshua Turner, replied, “Yes.” The court’s male conservatives were less fazed by such matters, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. Justice Samuel Alito wondered if the federal law would let women fake health crises to circumvent abortion bans, while Justice Clarence Thomas expressed concern about restricting states’ rights. The court’s conservative majority seems to have decided “to make it more dangerous to be pregnant in a red state” but hasn’t yet “settled on a rationale for doing so.”
This case isn’t about women’s health, said Grazie Pozo Christie in National Review, it’s about the Biden administration trying to push “ever more abortion on the American public.” The 1986 federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act was devised to save patients—especially pregnant mothers and their unborn children—from being turned away from private ERs “because they were uninsured or indigent.” It was pro-life “in the broadest sense of the term” and never intended to “mandate abortion in ERs.” And let’s be clear that Idaho’s law explicitly allows terminations
“in life-threatening cases,” said John McCormack in The Dispatch, including ectopic pregnancies, sepsis, and placental abruption. “So where exactly is the disagreement between the federal government and the state of Idaho?”
None of that matters if doctors are too scared to perform emergency abortions, said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. Faced with the threat of up to five years in prison, doctors in Idaho “are airlifting women to neighboring states” rather than performing terminations themselves. Across the 21 states with abortion bans, stories are emerging of pregnant women turned away from ERs “because they aren’t yet far enough over the precipice”—maybe they have an infection but not yet signs of sepsis— who are then left to miscarry on their own. “Bans like Idaho’s don’t obviate the need for abortion care. They only pretend that need doesn’t exist.”