SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
The U.S. Supreme Court Must Uphold EMTALA!
Written by Aliye Runyan, MD (obgyn, family planning)
AMSA Reproductive Health Strategist
I am an ob-gyn and abortion provider in New York. I listened, infuriated, to pieces of the Idaho v. United States oral arguments held at The Supreme Court on Wednesday while between abortion procedures. I want to preface this discussion by acknowledging that, like the case against mifepristone brought before The Court in March in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the fundamental arguments put forth by the State of Idaho this week are flawed.
It’s not an inaccurate statement to describe this case as “the cruelty is the point”.
The argument is that the Idaho state government has the right to supersede the federal law Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), that requires any emergency room to stabilize a patient at risk of significant morbidity or mortality. In many cases, including bleeding, infection, or any significant complication from a pregnancy, the appropriate intervention may be an abortion to save the patient’s life. This would mean that any hospitals under the state abortion ban would not have to provide abortion services, even when it would be necessary to save someone’s life. It is inconceivable to me that we are at a place in this country where the value of a pregnant person’s life is quite literally up to a state government, effectively tying the hands of physicians, like my emergency department colleagues, who would not be able to safely intervene in a situation where there are no trained abortion providers.
As ER physician Dr. Rob Davidson’s article pointed out, rulings like these have much larger ripple effects – physicians are and will continue to leave states with abortion bans if they are unable to practice medicine within the ethics and standards to which we are trained. To quote ER physician Dr. Esther Choo
I practice in a generally “safe” state – not without its own flaws in abortion access, however, as long as I practice in this state or others like it, I am assured I can practice full spectrum reproductive medical care, including abortion. I will likely not have to suffer the moral injury of watching a patient die because my hospital and my state decided that life saving interventions in complications of pregnancy are just not legal. Pregnancy is not always safe and not always a benign condition. Underlying all the arguments, it is clear that the State of Idaho and some of our justices believe it is a completely reasonable option to wait until a person is at the brink of death (and how do we determine when that is?) to end their pregnancy, which is frankly misogynistic and places the value of even an unviable pregnancy before the life of a living human being. I hope to see more outrage from my colleagues in many specialties, as the impact of this ruling will affect safe and ethical medical care far beyond abortion and obstetrics.
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #13:
Anti-Abortion Movement Showing True Colors, April 27, 2024
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