By The opinion
Jun 27, 2024, 11:46 AM EDT
This Thursday the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the state of Idaho allows temporary abortions in emergency cases in order to protect the life and health of the mother.
Given this decision, the White House issued a statement stating that the President of the United States, Joe Biden, supports this decision.
“Today’s Supreme Court Order Ensures Women in Idaho Can Access Health Care emergency relief they need while this case returns to the lower courts,” says President Biden’s statement.
“No woman should be denied care, forced to wait until she is near death, or forced to flee her home state. just to receive the medical care you need. This should never happen in America. Yet this is exactly what is happening in states across the country since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade,” the statement states.
The conservative-majority Supreme Court formally dismissed an appeal over Idaho’s strict abortion ban by a 6-3 vote, although the central issues in the case were not considered.
The decision thus restores a lower court ruling that temporarily allowed the state’s hospitals to perform emergency abortions.
Three of the court’s conservatives (Chief Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) sided with the three liberals. (Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) in dismissing Idaho’s appeal. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented.
“State abortion bans are also forcing doctors to leave Idaho and other states. In January, I heard heartbreaking testimony from Dr. Kylie Cooper, a doctor who cared for patients with high-risk pregnancies in Idaho. After practicing medicine under Idaho’s extreme abortion ban, which went into effect after Roe v. Wade, Dr. Cooper made the difficult decision to uproot his family, leaving the community he loved and moving to another state. Due to the state ban, and for the first time in her career, she was unable to offer the care that her patients with certain pregnancy complications desperately needed,” Joe Biden recounts in the statement.
Since the highest US court, with a conservative majority, eliminated federal protection for abortion in June 2022 by overturning the ‘Roe v. Wade’ ruling, dozens of states – Idaho among them – have carried out a frontal attack on women’s rights by implementing restrictive anti-abortion laws.
That same year, the Administration of the current American president, Joe Biden sued the state of Idaho – where abortion is prohibited in all stages of pregnancy – alleging that the restrictions on this procedure are regulated in part by federal law and cannot be interposed when it comes to saving the lives of pregnant women.
To defend this position, The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) was invoked40 years old, which requires hospitals that receive federal funds to provide emergency medical care to anyone, including for reproductive issues.
With information from EFE.
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