Idaho’s strict abortion ban faces scrutiny in federal appeals court hearing
BOISE, Idaho– A federal appeals court is expected to hear arguments Tuesday afternoon on whether Idaho should be prohibited from enforcing a strict abortion ban during medical emergencies when a pregnant patient’s life or health is at risk.
State law makes it a crime to perform an abortion unless the procedure is necessary to prevent the patient’s death. President Biden’s administration Idaho indicted two years ago, he claimed the law violates a federal rule called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), because it prevents doctors from performing abortions that save their patients from serious infections, organ loss or other major medical problems.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard the case earlier this year but sent it back to the lower court due to a procedural issue, leaving it without an answer. questions about legality of the state abortion ban.
Idaho officials have argued in lawsuits that the state’s abortion ban does not violate EMTALA. Instead, they say the fetus or embryo should also be considered a patient with protection under EMTALA. They also argue that doctors have ample leeway under the law to use common sense about when to treat pregnant people with life-threatening medical conditions.
“If you take EMTALA for what it actually says, there is no direct conflict with Idaho’s Defense of Life Act,” attorneys representing the Idaho Legislature wrote in court filings earlier this month. “Nothing in EMTALA requires physicians to violate state law. And nothing in Idaho law – whether under EMTALA-covered circumstances or otherwise – denies medical care to pregnant women.”
Approximately 50,000 people in the U.S. develop life-threatening complications during pregnancy each year. These complications can include major blood loss, sepsis, or the loss of reproductive organs. In rare cases, doctors may need to terminate a pregnancy to protect the health of the pregnant person, especially in cases where the fetus has no chance of surviving.
But some state abortion bans have involved medical decisions that once seemed obvious I feel particularly charged for emergency room doctors. Complaints that pregnant patients were rejected from U.S. emergency departments increased in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“These damages are not hypothetical,” Idaho’s largest hospital system, St. Luke’s Health System, wrote in a friend-of-the-court letter in October. “In all of 2023, before Idaho’s law went into effect, only one pregnant patient who presented to St. Luke’s with a medical emergency was taken out of state for care. But in the few months that Idaho’s new abortion law was in effect, six pregnant St. Luke’s patients with medical emergencies were transferred abroad to terminate their pregnancies.”
One of those patients had severe preeclampsia — a condition that causes dangerously high blood pressure that can be fatal if left untreated — and the others had their waters rupture prematurely, putting them at risk of life-threatening infections, St. Luke’s said .
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said Monday. She noted recent news reports in Texas about women who died after being denied appropriate treatment for incomplete miscarriages. “The reality is that exceptions don’t work. They are not actually protecting the health and rights of pregnant people, regardless of what is written on the page, and that is simply the reality of threatening doctors with criminal penalties.”