Supreme Court’s decision in Idaho abortion case maintains America’s deadly status quo | Opinion

If voters of every gender don’t make abortion rights their No. 1 issue this November, our country is headed down a dark road from which it will take decades to recover.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday to formally dismiss an appeal on Idaho’s abortion ban is only a temporary delay in the far-right’s attempt to completely ban abortion in America, and keep women and pregnant people under the thumb of conservative moral values, instead of providing them desperate, life-saving medical care.

Opinion

The federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or the EMTALA, requires federally-funded hospitals to provide emergency, stabilizing care to patients regardless of their ability to pay. However, the federal law was in direct opposition to the total abortion ban passed by the state of Idaho after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Everyone should have access to the care they need in an emergency, and that includes abortion care. Idaho’s abortion ban left hospitals and patients without this option, in direct violation of the EMTALA.

“For 40 years, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act has played an essential role in helping to stabilize pregnant people facing medical emergencies. With as many as 15% of pregnancies experiencing potentially life-threatening conditions, it is critically important that states with abortion bans are not allowed to endanger the lives of pregnant people by denying them the emergency care they need,” wrote the California Medical Association in a statement.

The Biden Administration sued Idaho and the state appealed to the Supreme Court this week, where it was decided in a 6-3 judgment that the justices would not hear the case. The decision effectively prolongs a lower court’s decision to overturn the state’s ban until the matter can be settled, meaning abortions can be performed in Idaho despite the state’s ban.

On its face, this decision looks like a win for abortion rights. But it isn’t. It merely kicks the issue back to a lower appeals court where the ban will almost certainly be reinstituted, and Idaho’s pregnant population will once again soon need to find proper medical care many miles from home.

Hospitals must be able to provide emergency abortions, and that decision must be the right of a pregnant person and their doctor — not politicians. Anything less than total reproductive rights for America’s pregnant people is unacceptable.

Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson said it best in her scathing dissent: “How long must pregnant patients wait for an answer?” she wrote. “Will this Court just have a do-over, rehearing and rehashing the same arguments we are considering now, just at a comparatively more convenient point in time? Or maybe we will keep punting on this issue altogether, allowing chaos to reign wherever lower courts enable States to flagrantly undercut federal law, facilitating the suffering of people in need of urgent medical treatment.”

In the meantime, the Supreme Court’s decision provides no clarity to Idaho doctors, as they work under shifting laws and legalities.

The previous order from a trial judge that had blocked enforcement of Idaho’s abortion ban in medical emergencies will go back into effect, and pregnant people in Idaho with potential medical complications from their pregnancies will hopefully find some relief.

But it will be short-lived.

Because yet again, women and pregnant people have become the casualties of partisan politics and policies ultimately designed to give a clump of cells more rights than a living, breathing human, in the name of a religion that many do not even believe in.

Americans are living in a theocracy when it comes to reproductive rights. If we do not elect a Congress that is willing to bring forward protections for its people, then this nation is destined to kill many more women and pregnant people in the coming years.

That the text of the decision was leaked (yet again) on the Supreme Court’s website on Wednesday before it was officially announced the next day — just hours before the first presidential debate — is surely not coincidental. Reproductive rights must be the top issue for voters in every state this election year.

Make no mistake about it: The hell that pregnant people now find themselves in is a direct consequence of former President Donald Trump’s first-term policies and the federal and supreme court judges his administration appointed.

A second Trump term would be devastating for women, for mothers, for pregnant people and for families. A vote for Trump this November is a vote against mercy and sanity.

Voters need only look to Idaho — and Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas and Indiana, to name just a few — to see the deadly limbo that awaits us if we continue in this way.