The Biden administration had argued the state’s law violated a federal law about ‘patient dumping’ that required stabilizing care for emergency room patients.
The Supreme Court on June 27 decided to dismiss Idaho’s appeal against a lower court ruling that granted an exception to its strict abortion law for abortions deemed to be medical emergencies.
The decision allows emergency abortions to proceed in Idaho, while a challenge to the state’s abortion law moves through the lower courts.
President Joe Biden praised the ruling.
“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. No woman should be denied care, made to wait until she’s near death, or forced to flee her home state just to receive the health care she needs,” he said in a written statement.
“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.”
The release of the judicial opinion came after the court’s website staff inadvertently published a version of the document on June 26 and then took it down.
The Supreme Court’s new opinion is unsigned and marked “per curiam,” which means “for the court,” but does not identify the opinion’s author. The opinion also states that the decision to grant the petition and hear the case was “improvidently granted,” which means the justices decided that they had made a mistake in agreeing to hear the case.
The opinion itself consists of a single sentence and does not provide reasons why it was issued. It is possible the opinion was labeled per curiam and kept to a mere two dozen words in length because there was significant disagreement among the justices on the reasoning underlying the decision.
The ruling means that the case will return to the lower courts where the litigants will be free to continue arguing about its merits.
The new opinion was handed down two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t confer a right to abortion and returned its regulation to the states. The ruling overturned Roe v. Wade (1973).
A version of the Dobbs opinion was leaked weeks before that decision was published. An investigation by the court failed to identify the source of the leak. The leak was followed by raucous protests at the homes of the court’s conservative justices. One man was arrested for attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
