Supreme Court allows Texas to nullify federal law, deny women emergency medical treatment
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Always instructive when the Supreme Court is willing to use the shadow docket to alter the legal baseline and when it’s not:
The Supreme Court on Monday refused to require doctors in Texas to perform certain emergency abortions when the procedure would conflict with the state’s strict abortion ban.
The justices left in place a lower-court ruling that rejected the Biden administration’s claim that federal law requires access to emergency abortion care even in states that restrict the procedure.
As is common when the court refuses to review a lower court decision, the order — issued on the first day of the Supreme Court’s new term — did not explain the justices’ reasoning. There were no noted dissents.
The court’s action comes just months after the justices intervened in a similar case in Idaho and reflects continued fallout and confusion from its decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the nationwide right to abortion after nearly 50 years.
In the Idaho case, the justices in June temporarily cleared the way for emergency room doctors to terminate pregnancies without being subject to prosecution under that state’s abortion ban. At the time, abortion rights groups and medical experts called the Idaho decision a preliminaryvictory that did not settle the broader question of whether a federal emergency-care law preempts strict state abortion bans.
In both Idaho and Texas, the Biden administration has asserted that the federal law — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — mandatesemergency abortion care when it is the only treatment that can save a pregnant woman’s life or prevent serious harm to her health, including conditions short of death such as organ failure or loss of fertility.
One reason that Trump keeps repeating the “you won’t have to think about abortion” line is presumably that he remembers it as a staple of what Savvy pundits said would happen if Roe was overruled.