What to Know About the Abortion Case Before the Supreme Court

The core question: Do emergency rooms have to treat sick pregnant patients like everyone else and stabilize them? Or can "pro-life" laws allow them to refuse treatment to desperately ill women?

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Just two years after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and upended the abortion rights landscape in America, another abortion case is before the conservative-majority court, and this one brings a core anti-abortion aim into clear focus: To remove abortion from the realm of healthcare, even if it’s necessary to save a woman’s life or protect her health.

This case hinges on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, a federal law that requires emergency rooms the nation over to stabilize critically ill patients who come through their doors; if they are unable to stabilize those patients, they must transfer them to a facility that can provide proper care. This should be pretty unobjectionable — hospitals are in the business of saving lives, and emergency rooms should provide emergency care regardless of a patient’s identity, history, or ability to pay.

But the anti-abortion movement disagrees, because under EMALTA, health workers may have to provide seriously ill pregnant women with abortions in order to preserve their health — and anti-abortion advocates would rather pregnant women lose various organs, wind up in the ICU, be riddled with systemic infections, lose their ability to have children in the future, or nearly die than be allowed to safely end even health-threatening pregnancies (for the record, many anti-abortion groups also oppose life-saving abortions, but that isn’t specifically at issue in this case).