The United States Supreme Court concluded on Thursday, 27 June 2024 that abortions can be done in Idaho when pregnant women face medical crises, resolving the divisive issue without really determining the case on its merits. The 6-3 decision, with three of the six conservative justices dissenting, effectively upheld a lower court’s determination that Idaho’s Republican-backed near-total abortion ban must give way to a 1986 United States legislation known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) when the two statutes conflict.

On Wednesday, 26 July 2024, a version of the verdict was unintentionally put to the court’s website, marking the second time in the last two years that an important abortion decision has been disclosed before its formal release. President Joe Biden’s administration had sued Idaho, claiming that EMTALA supersedes state law. EMTALA assures that patients can access emergency care at hospitals that are funded by the Federal Medicare program. Idaho is one of six States that prohibit abortion and make no exceptions to safeguard pregnant women’s health.

“Today’s Supreme Court order ensures that women in Idaho can access the emergency medical care they need while this case returns to the lower courts, Biden told reporters. No woman should be denied care, forced to wait until she is near death, or forced to flee her home state to receive the medical care she requires. This should never happen in America.

“Yet, this is exactly what is happening in States across the country since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade,” Biden said, referring to the 2022 ruling that invalidated a 1973 precedent that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion.

Biden, who is running for re-election this year, has made abortion rights a central theme of his campaign, as Democrats attempt to exploit the issue to their advantage against Republicans in races around the country. Donald Trump is the Republican candidate running against Joe Biden in the November 5 election in the United States.

As president, Trump appointed three of the six justices who voted in favor of the 2022 abortion case, and he has been on the defensive about abortion during this year’s campaign. Trump has stated in states with abortion bans that he favors exceptions for rape, incest, and protecting the mother’s life, as well as the provision of in-vitro fertilization.

Thursday’s judgment, which was an unsigned, one-line order, lifted the justices’ block, or stay, on the lower court’s ruling from January. But the Supreme Court did not decide the underlying legal dispute, instead dismissing the case as “improvidently granted.” In a separate judgment, Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred with the court’s decision to release the stay but stated that she would not have dismissed the case, referring to the legal situation as a “fragile detente.”

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