By Renee Carlson, General Counsel, True North Legal
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court released its opinion in State of Idaho v. United States of America. At issue in this caseis Idaho’s Defense of Life Act, which makes nearly all elective abortions illegal in the state of Idaho. The Biden administration challenged the law claiming the Emergency Labor And Medical Treatment Act (EMTALA) – a law that was “enacted in response to widely publicized reports of emergency care providers transferring indigent patients from one hospital to the next while the patients’ emergency medical conditions worsened” —
forces emergency room doctors to perform abortions and overrides state laws like Idaho’s Defense of Life Act. Yet there is no reference to abortion in EMTALA, and no implications that providing medical treatment also mandates hospitals provide abortions, while the term “unborn child” is included in the EMTALA statute. Moreover, the Court’s clear precedent in Dobbs is that the legality of abortion is now left to the states to decide.
True North Legal, along with our colleagues at Kansas Family Voice and Cross Castle filed an amicus brief in this case in support of Idaho, representing Minnesota Family Council and twenty-five other family policy organizations across the country who are dedicated to protecting and defending life-affirming laws across the country.
I also had the privilege of being in the Court watching oral arguments and can attest firsthand to the Biden administration’s reliance on novel legal theories about EMTALA, conflating unfettered access to elective abortion on demand with treatment for pregnancy-related emergency medical conditions such as ectopic pregnancies. This false and confusing narrative is consistent with the fearmongering of national and local abortion activists and Planned Parenthood, including in Minnesota. Here, local activists and legislators proffered the same misinformation about the necessity of abortion hoping that fearmongering would win the day, in a failed effort by many legislators in the Democratic party to pass a so-called state Equal Rights Amendment, which would add abortion up until birth to the Minnesota Constitution.
Ultimately, the Court did not address the merits of the case, and sent it back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for further consideration. In other words, this case is not over and we can have hope in that outcome. As Idaho’s Chief of Constitutional Litigation and Policy Josh Turner, who argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, aptly remarked about the decision, “…We forced the Biden administration to make major concessions before the Supreme Court that it did not want to make, and those concessions are going to save many unborn lives. The people of Idaho should not be fooled by the misleading headlines in the media. Instead, I encourage everyone to read the court’s opinions for themselves. The court may have decided to ‘punt’ today on the merits given the Biden administration’s ‘important’ and ‘critical’ concessions, but I have zero doubt after reading the decision, after standing before the justices and answering their questions, and after listening to the DOJ’s best arguments to defend the Biden administration’s legally untenable position, that Idaho’s Defense of Life Act is not preempted by EMTALA and will be vindicated in full.”
While much is left to be decided in State of Idaho v. United States of America, we can celebrate the Court’s unquestionable affirmation of conscience protections for doctors in U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, stating “EMTALA does not require doctors to perform abortions or provide abortion-related medical treatment over their conscience objections…” In other words, a physician cannot be compelled to abandon their oath to do no harm or be forced to violate their conscience by performing an abortion.
Please continue to pray for this significant case and the other legal battles in our state and across the country in the continued fight to protect life. We can assure you that at True North Legal we will unapologetically continue to support life and defend justice for women and preborn children in Minnesota by educating the public, and advocating for them in the legislature and in the courts. As I shared with you last week, the prolife movement is bigger than one day at the U.S. Supreme Court—we have the long view in mind.