Supreme Court appears to side with Biden admin in abortion case, according to draft briefly posted on website

The opinion showed a majority of the court agreed to dismiss the appeal, according to Bloomberg, which reported it had reviewed a copy of the opinion.

The release was a stunning development at the Supreme Court, which normally ensures that its opinions are published. The abortion case was considered one of the most significant in the current term, which ends before the July 4 holiday.

At issue is Idaho’s strict abortion ban, which carves out an exception for the life of the pregnant woman. The Biden administration has argued that federal law also requires hospitals to perform abortions in cases where a pregnant woman’s health is at risk.

The dismissal would leave open the opinion of the full 9th ​​U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with the Biden administration in the case. Such a decision is a victory for the Biden administration and will be a relief to Idaho women who fear that medical complications from their pregnancies could endanger their health.

But it would leave unresolved the central question of whether the federal law protects access to abortion in medical emergencies, and is unlikely to end the uncertainty and uncertainty doctors feel about how to navigate strict abortion bans while caring for their patients .

CNN has not independently reviewed the opinion. Bloomberg did not publish the document.

A High Court spokesman confirmed that a “document” had been “inadvertently and briefly” uploaded to the court’s website. Supreme Court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe stressed that the “opinion” in the case “has not been published” and will be “issued in due course.”

A copy reviewed by Bloomberg showed the court voted 6-3 to allow emergency abortions to be performed in Idaho temporarily while the case continues.

The Supreme Court’s ruling “will prevent Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban when termination of pregnancy is necessary to prevent serious harm to a woman’s health,” Justice Elena Kagan said in a concurring opinion, according to Bloomberg.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately to say she would not dismiss the case, according to the document reviewed by Bloomberg.

“Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is a delay,” she wrote.

“While this court drags on and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing medical emergencies remain in limbo as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires.”

“If the information is accurate, this would be a significant but temporary victory for the Biden administration,” said Steve Vladek, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas Law School.

The Justice Department and the White House declined to comment on the Bloomberg story and the mispublished document pending the release of the Supreme Court’s official opinion.

How abortion bans play out in medical emergencies has emerged as a particularly explosive political point in the wake of the Roe v. Wade reversal. The Idaho ban in question allows abortions if a pregnant woman’s life is in danger, but not her health. Six states have bans like Idaho’s that do not include a pregnant woman’s health exception, the Justice Department said, although several of those laws are the subject of litigation.

The Supreme Court case, the second to deal with abortion this year, focused on scenarios where pregnancy complications pose serious risks to the woman’s health but are not yet life-threatening. The Biden administration has argued that Idaho’s ban could force patients, for example, to endure hysterectomies and other life-long complications if doctors refuse to perform emergency room abortions.

The Justice Department sued Idaho over the August 2022 abortion ban, several weeks before it was scheduled to take effect. He argued that a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — or EMTALA — requires hospitals that receive Medicare funding to offer the procedure in medical emergencies. The law, passed in 1986, requires these hospitals to provide “stabilization” treatment for emergency room patients who face serious impairment of bodily functions.

Congress passed EMTALA to prevent hospitals from turning away patients who cannot afford their care. The law does not specify what procedures hospitals must perform to stabilize patients, and Idaho has accused the Biden administration of misinterpreting the Reagan-era law to “create a nationwide mandate for abortions in hospital emergency rooms.” The state also argued that changes to the abortion law since it took effect meant that doctors could adhere to EMTALA and the ban at the same time.

But the Biden administration has strongly rejected that position, arguing that doctors would hesitate to provide the procedure — even if they technically could — for fear of prosecution. US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, told the justices that doctors would likely not provide an abortion if they feared a “prosecutor looking over their shoulder” who might “suggest that maybe they really don’t necessary to prevent death.”

Idaho law makes abortion a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Doctors can also lose their medical licenses.

At oral arguments on April 24, several members of the court’s conservative majority expressed skepticism about the Biden administration’s position, with some justices framing the case as a federal encroachment on state powers to regulate medicine. The Republican-appointed judges also focused on amendments Congress made to the federal law in 1989 that added language about a pregnant woman’s “unborn child” to its protections. Idaho argued that it was pointless for the unborn child protection law to require hospitals to offer abortions.

The Biden administration countered that the references were added to make clear that hospitals cannot turn away women in labor whose fetus is at risk. Prelogar told the court that the phrase should not be read as displacing hospitals’ obligations to treat women whose pregnancies have caused serious risks to their own health.

During the hearing, the court’s three liberal justices focused on excruciating medical emergencies where, under Idaho’s theory of state and federal law, women can be denied abortion care. Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, weighed in on that line of inquiry, expressing surprise at how Idaho’s attorney, Joshua Turner, handled questioning as the justice pressed him on some of the hypotheses.

A U.S. District Court in Idaho last year blocked enforcement of the state law. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that ruling, allowing the law to take effect. Weeks later, the full 9th ​​Circuit overturned the panel’s decision, putting enforcement of the law back on hold. In January, the Supreme Court agreed to decide the case and allowed the law to take effect while it did so.