The U.S. Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 ruling in Moyle v. United States on Thursday to toss the Biden administration’s attempt to force its abortion activism on pro-life states such as Idaho back to lower courts. The majority of justices agreed that, despite issuing a previous stay that favored Idaho, the case was “improvidently granted” and will not receive a merit judgment at this time.
Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson did not technically side with the Biden administration’s drastic expansion of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services redefined at the bidding of President Joe Biden shortly after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. They did, however, keep with a leaked version of their decision when they refused to curb the bureaucracy’s abortion activism.
EMTALA was enacted in 1986 to stop hospitals from turning away patients based on their inability to pay for their expenses. The law not only mandates adequate treatment for the “unborn child” but also explicitly does “not preempt any State or local law requirement, except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with” EMTALA.
CMS, however, claimed that EMTALA, which on its face poses no conflict to pro-life policies, was broad enough to include abortion as a “stabilizing” procedure “irrespective of any state laws or mandates that apply to specific procedures.”
Idaho’s Defense of Life Act, which went into effect in August 2022, prohibits abortion except in cases of rape
