It seems that when it comes to abortion, the sacred customs of the Supreme Court are at greater risk of being blown up, and with them, the tranquility of the highest judicial body in the United States.
If two years ago a historic leak made it possible to know months in advance that its nine magistrates were ready to overthrow the precedent of Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed federal protection of abortion throughout the country in 1973, the mistaken publication this Wednesday of a file on the Supreme Court’s website seems to have ended the wait for the decision of the case Moyle v. United States. In this, the judges They questioned whether hospital emergencies are an exception to Idaho’s prohibition on performing an abortion in cases where the patient’s health is at stake.
The file was public for only a few minutes, long enough for it to reach reporters from Bloomberg. The document, which appears to be pending review and has a format that is not the usual one for the Supreme Court’s opinions, soon disappeared from the institution’s website, the place where its rulings are disseminated between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. the days scheduled for it (this Wednesday was one of those days). After a quick look at its content, the news agency launched an urgent message: “The Supreme Court is inclined to allow emergency abortions in Idaho,” said the headline, which was followed by a brief text without much more information.
That document – which could change with respect to the final sentence; The same was said in 2022 about the leak of the Supreme Court, and then not a single comma was altered – it includes a vote of six votes in favor (those of the three liberal judges, added to those of three of the six conservatives), and three in favor. against (Samuel Alito, drafter of the ruling that overturned Roe, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch).
a postponement
The reasons of the majority? They cannot be interpreted precisely as a victory for the movement in favor of abortion rights, because the argument is limited to understanding that the Supreme Court should not have accepted the case so quickly and reestablished the order of a lower court that allowed State hospitals perform emergency abortions for health reasons. “Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is a postponement,” writes Ketanji Brown Jackson in a concurring opinion.
The Supreme Court’s public relations office reacted to the imbroglio with a statement acknowledging the slip: “The court’s publications unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the website,” according to Patricia McCabe, one of its press agents. . “The opinion in [el caso] Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States will be issued in due course.”
The Supreme Court’s judicial term is about to end, and, in principle, only Thursday and Friday remain to publish the final rulings. The most anticipated is the one that will decide whether Donald Trump, who appointed three judges while he was in the White House, is granted full immunity or not for the events that led to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The origin of the Idaho case is in a lawsuit from the Joe Biden Administration that sought the prevalence of a federal law ―EMTALA is its acronym in English and regulates the work and powers of emergency doctors― on the state standard of Idaho, one of the most restrictive in the country for the freedom and reproductive health of women.
For plaintiff Mike Moyle, Speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives, this claim by the Biden Administration is “an exercise of pure executive power,” and “an intolerable excess of federal power.” For Washington, it was rather a loophole through which to crack the anti-abortion front that has already spread throughout the South, large areas of the Midwest, and some Western States of the country.
This Monday marked two years since the historic decision of the Supreme Court that repealed the precedent of Roe v. Wade, and returned to the States the power to legislate on the subject. Since then, 14 (Idaho among them) have completely banned a right that women in this country took for granted for half a century.
If the Supreme Court’s decision ends up being the one that advances the draft, it would have effects on all those places, where emergency doctors would have permission to perform pregnancy terminations in certain circumstances. In the last two years, cases of pregnant women rejected in emergency rooms in these States have multiplied. EMTALA requires hospitals that accept Medicare (they are almost all that accept that type of social security) to provide care to stabilize the patient, regardless of whether or not she can pay for the treatment.
This Wednesday’s involuntary dissemination of the Idaho ruling comes two weeks after another ruling by the Supreme Court, whose justices voted unanimously to maintain unrestricted access to mifepristone, a popular drug that competes, along with another called misoprostol, in 63% of cases. pregnancy terminations that are practiced in the country, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute.
The judges of the high court once again justified their ruling on a technical issue and without going into the substance of the matter: they understood that the association of anti-abortion Christian doctors after the case, created expressly to launch the judicial crusade against the drug agency (FDA), did not meet the legal requirement of having suffered sufficient harm to be authorized to sue.
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