The case comes from Idaho, where the law banning abortions is sufficiently strict that the state’s leading hospital system says its patients are at risk.
The Supreme Court hears yet another abortion case on Wednesday. This one tests whether a state can prevent a pregnant woman from receiving what her doctors say is essential medical treatment, including the termination of a pregnancy, if her health, but not her life, is in grave danger.
In 1986, Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA. The law provides that hospitals receiving Medicare and Medicaid payments from the federal government—and that is most hospitals—must provide stabilizing care for any patient whose life or health is in serious jeopardy. If the hospital can’t provide the care, it is required to provide safe transport to another hospital that can.The facts of the case
Wednesday’s test case comes from Idaho, where the law banning abortions is sufficiently strict that the state’s leading hospital system says its patients are at risk.
«There are patients who present with conditions that are very serious that could result in loss of reproductive organs, that could result in permanent disability and that could eventually become life threatening but that are not at that moment life threatening,» says lawyer Lindsey Harrison. She represents St. Luke’s Health System, Idaho’s only not-for-profit community-owned and led hospital system, which operates nine emergency departments in the state.
«For physicians at St. Luke’s hospitals…there’s a conflict between what federal law says they should do, which would allow them to save the patients organs…and what Idaho allows them to do, which is nothing, until the patient’s life is at risk,» Harrison says.
The result is that patients often have to be transferred by ambulance or helicopter out of state, and arranging that takes time, especially in rough Idaho winters. «That delay itself can cause a lot of harm to the patient,» she adds.
