The significance of the reference to “fetus” in a federal emergency medical law at the center of an Idaho abortion ban lawsuit has been a subject of fierce debate between liberals and the far right, according to a court ruling obtained Wednesday by Bloomberg.
If the case goes back to the Supreme Court, it could become a big problem.
Conservative opinion: Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, that accepted arguments made by the state of Idaho and its allies in defending the state’s strict abortion ban. Justice Alito wrote that the federal law key to the dispute, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), “expressly protects the unborn.”
“Far from requiring hospitals to perform abortions, EMTALA’s language explicitly requires that Medicare-funded hospitals protect the health of pregnant women and ‘fetuses,'” Alito wrote.
He later added that “EMTALA requires Medicare-funded hospitals to treat, rather than abort, ‘fetuses.'”
Liberal opinion: Justice Elena Kagan, in a joint opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, sought to push back against Justice Alito’s argument, stating that three of the law’s four references to “fetuses” relate to how hospitals handle the transport of laboring women and are therefore not relevant to the type of emergency pregnancy complication at issue in the case.
Both sides of the abortion debate focused on how the Supreme Court would treat the term “fetus” in this case. Abortion opponents argued that Congress showed it was interested in protecting the life of the fetus when it added the term, while abortion rights advocates countered that this was not Congress’s intent and worried that a conservative Court would read fetal personhood into federal law for the first time.
At this point, it is unclear whether either interpretation will be accepted by the majority of the High Court.
