Maroc - RAWSTORY.COM - Raw Story - 27/Jun 14:39

Supreme Court stops short of saying doctors must save women's lives and health

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the most recent abortion case mandating that doctors provide life-saving abortions if a pregnant woman is dying and in the event her health is in jeopardy. The ruling comes after the decision was accidentally leaked to the public, Bloomberg Law reported Wednesday. "The Court’s Publications Unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the Court’s website,” Patricia McCabe, the court’s public information officer, said in a statement to the site. “The Court’s opinion in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States will be issued in due course.”The Supreme Court's elimination of Roe v. Wade has brought a number of debates to the forefront as doctors and hospitals grow increasingly nervous about what is and isn't legal around reproductive health.In the decision, the liberal judges made the demand that medical professionals act to save the mother or the fetus. Conservatives attempted to have it both ways. In their concurrence, they passed the case back down to the lower court."An Idaho law prohibits abortions unless necessary to prevent a pregnant woman's death; the law makes no exception for abortions necessary to prevent grave harms to the woman's health, like the loss of her fertility," the ruling from Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and in part Ketanji Brown Jackson. "Before the law could take effect, the Federal Government sued the State under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). That law requires a Medicare-funded hospital to provide essential care to patients experiencing medical emergencies. The Government's suit contended that EMTALA preempts the Idaho abortion law in a narrow class of cases: when the state law bars a hospital from performing an abortion needed to prevent serious health harms."Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts penned their own concurrence, but demanded that the lower court formulate a decision in keeping with the EMTALA laws. In the case before the High Court, petitioners asked that the long-standing federal law, EMTALA, continue to stand over state laws that ban abortion at all costs, even in the cases of the life and health of the mother. In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito compared abortion, a long-time approved procedure, to an experimental cancer treatment. In a post by the ACLU, the group said that overturning Roe "did not diminish these longstanding federal protections, which override state laws that would prohibit such care, but now, extreme politicians are doing everything in their power to prevent someone experiencing emergency pregnancy complications from getting care in emergency rooms."The case before the court came out of Idaho, in which the GOP-led legislatures passed legislation that would block all emergency care for pregnant people. The abortion ban in the state allowed no exception for rape, incest or the life and health of the mother. "St. Luke’s Health System, the largest health system in Idaho, which sees hundreds of thousands of emergency department visits each year, reports that they are now transferring pregnant patients with medical emergencies out of state to get the care they need, but even that delay can also increase the unacceptable risks patients face," the ACLU also pointed out.