Amicus Brief, Idaho v. U.S. (EMTALA & Emergency Abortion Care)

OVERVIEW

This amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States details how abortion restrictions, including Idaho’s extreme abortion ban, can conflict with physicians’ responsibilities under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).

The brief states:

“Both courts and the medical community repeatedly have recognized that situations arise where ‘stabilizing treatment’ under EMTALA requires termination of a pregnancy. Under EMTALA, hospitals ‘must provide medical care to stabilize all emergency patients,’ including patients requiring abortion care. Yet emergency circumstances under EMTALA do not always meet the benchmark set by the Idaho Total Abortion Ban and similar laws, which allow abortion care only if, in that moment, it is ‘necessary to prevent the death’ of the pregnant patient. As demonstrated by the accounts of PRH physicians, even when medical conditions and complications are not considered imminently life-threatening, they can have serious consequences to patients’ wellbeing and can become life-threatening if stabilizing intervention is withheld. Indeed, waiting to meet the life-threatening threshold before providing abortion care can jeopardize a pregnant patient’s health…

“Rather than exercise their medical judgment while treating patients in emergency situations, physicians are now forced to make a series of challenging—and potentially criminal or career-ending—decisions about how to treat pregnant patients within both the confines of increasingly restrictive statutory law and their moral and professional medical obligations.”