Emergency Abortions In Idaho Legal For Now, Even As Trump DOJ Drops Case

An abortion fight that made it all the way to the Supreme Court was dismissed Wednesday, as the Trump Justice Department dropped a case its Biden predecessor had brought to try to protect emergency room abortions in Idaho.

The Biden DOJ had sued Idaho, arguing that its near-complete abortion ban violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which mandates that federally-funded emergency rooms must provide stabilizing treatment to patients in crisis. If that needed treatment is an abortion, the government argued, Idaho providers must perform them.

A hospital system in Idaho, foreseeing the Trump DOJ heel turn, had filed essentially the same case back at the district court level in January. It asked the judge to grant a temporary restraining order, ensuring that emergency room abortions could continue even when the DOJ got the case dismissed at the 9th Circuit.

The judge granted the hospital the temporary restraining order Tuesday.

“St. Luke’s further reports that if there is even a short period without an injunction, Idaho hospitals would be required to ‘train their staff about the change in legal obligations, distracting them from providing medical care to their patients, and would once again require them to airlift patients out of state should a medical emergency arise so that those patients can consider the full spectrum of medically indicated care, including termination of pregnancy,’” wrote U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill, a Clinton appointee.

Winmill held a hearing Wednesday, during which he got into an extended back-and-forth with Idaho Deputy AG David Myers who argued that abortions are never necessary as stabilizing treatment, that airlifting the patient to another state for treatment is enough.

“Stabilizing care is to prevent patients from suffering death or serious bodily injury, and if abortion is the only way to provide that, is it not at least an option that has to be made available to the doctor under EMTALA?” Winmill asked.

“There is no situation where that’s the case,” replied Myers.

The availability of these emergency abortions in Idaho has been yanked around by the courts, including the Supreme Court, which let Idaho’s ban forbid those abortions in the many months it took to consider the case. Ultimately, it decided that it had intervened too early, and sent it back to the 9th Circuit — the same court from which the case was dismissed Wednesday.

Winmill called that period, where the Supreme Court allowed emergency room abortions to be blocked, a “natural experiment” during which at least six women were airlifted to neighboring states when they came to the emergency room in medical crises.

The case will now start again from the ground up, the Idaho hospital system stepping in to advocate for the pregnant patients the Trump administration has no interest in defending.